中国农村社团的发育、纠纷调解与群体性上访

在总结中国农村社团和群体性抗争活动既有研究的基础上,本文通过随机抽样数据的定量分析,描述了民间社团在中国农村的发育情况,重点讨论了具备两个性质的“农村半独立社团”。第一,社团的实际负责人不是政府官员或村干部；第二,社团的重大决策不需经由基层政府或村干部批准。实证研究发现,当这些“半独立的社团”具备了社会纠纷调解职能时,就可以有效地削减村庄的大规模群体性上访,而由官方控制的负责治保或民调类的社团却无法达到同样的效果。文章结合实地调查的经验,对该实证发现的现实机理及其政策含义进行了多方面探讨。

Through reviewing past research on farmers’ associations and collective petitions，this paper adopts a qualitative analysis with random-sample data to investigate the distribution of semi-independent associations，namely the recognized organizations not led or controlled by the government，and their mediating function in rural China. The empirical results show that semi-independent associations with mediation function can prevent large-scale collective petitions in Chinese villages. In contrast，the rural mediation associations controlled by the government have no capacity in mitigating the scale or frequency of the collective petitions. On the basis of field work，the underlying mechanisms of this finding and their policy implications are also addressed in this paper.