Dilemmas of Ancestors, Lineage and Age

Traditional China has often been described as a Confucian society where a pre-defined social hierarchy of rulers versus subjects, male versus female, old versus young, to a high extent determined social behaviour and political decision making and practice. Anthropological and sociological studies of China based on fieldwork after the 1908s have testified to a continued, and in some aspects strengthened, importance of kinship, ancestors and lineage ties in the everyday life and culture of the Chinese.Footnote ² Especially in the Southern parts of China lineage-based organisations, often stretching into South East Asia and other areas with a long history of Chinese immigrations, have re-established their influence.Footnote ³ But also in Northern China, as described in different ways by Jun Jing (Reference Jun1996), Yan Yunxiang (Reference Yan2003) and Myron Cohen (Reference Cohen2005), ancestors and lineage affiliation continue to constitute an organising principle for many people in their social contexts, although concepts and practices related to kinship are at the same time undergoing significant changes. As shown by, for instance, Lily Lee Tsai local governments in a number of Chinese villages now rely on temple and village groups to fund and manage public welfare services which used to be the responsibility of the state (Tsai Reference Tsai2002).

Concerning relationships between the generations, studies of rural China since the 1970s often point towards high degrees of authority continuously attributed to the oldest people, mostly the men. Anthropological studies from different periods and places in China refer, for instance, to the dominant position of the man as the traditional Confucian family head. Hugh Baker, in his study from 1979, showed how the male family head had a great deal of power over other members of the family group with regard to property control, marriages and other important family matters (Baker Reference Baker1979). Jack and Sulamith Heins Potter, in their seminal study of China's peasants from the early 1980s, refer to the classical Chinese Book of Filial Duty as the written confirmation of the moral obligation of the youth to care for the old which they found practiced and largely taken for granted in the villages they studied (Potter and Potter Reference Potter and Potter1990: 228). And, in a more recent study of women's work in rural China, Tamara Jacka concludes that “the patrilocal, exogamous nature of most rural marriages continues to bolster the husband's ultimate authority and the wife's relative insecurity”. This means, Jacka argues, that it is “particularly difficult for married women to gain the trust necessary to assume any form of leadership in the “outside” sphere, whether it be in politics or in the local economy” (Jacka Reference Jacka1997: 61).

However, there have also been signs of a decreasing influence and importance of local senior authority. Seen from the perspective of “private life” in a Northern Chinese village, Yan Yunxiang provides a convincing analysis of how traditional power and authority of seniority within families has been undergoing significant changes during the last 20 years. In this period, the transformation of Chinese society has brought about a young generation that, to a much higher extent than before, is faced with a variety of choices related to partners and the possibility to live in stem families or taking control over individual income and resources (Yan Reference Yan2003).Footnote ⁴ This is also in line with the urban developments in China today where rapid economic changes and modernisation have created an increased political, moral and commercial focus on youth as a group.

In China, the retirement age for workers is 50 for women and 55 for men (55 and 60, respectively, for cadres) and people are therefore expected to be out of the workforce at a relatively early age, many of them without the right to pension. The majority of the vast rural population (approximately 65% of the 1.3 billion population) have in any case no right to pension at all since this privilege has so far only applied to people employed in state organisations and state-owned (and now in principle also a wide range of other kinds of) enterprises. Because of the last 20 years of strict family policies, many parents (also in rural areas) now only have one or two children and the issue of old people's care has become politically acute. While grown-up children are still required both by law and according to tradition to take care of their parents, more efforts are now put into establishing old people's homes run by the state, county, privately or by charity organisations. Demographically, the Chinese population suffers from a relative overweight of older people in comparison with most other countries. More than 10% of the population is above 60 years old and with the changing family structures and practices this is creating new economic challenges for the state in terms of providing healthcare and housing for a large part of the population currently with no rights to pension or public care.Footnote ⁵

China is in the midst of an institutionalised individualisation process that poses new demands on the individual in terms of social security, health insurance, work contracts, law enforcements, and so forth.Footnote ⁶ Modern state institutions and regulations increasingly demand that positions and status be granted on the basis of individual accomplishment and technical competence rather than on age, class and customary authority, and it may look as if a long persistent Confucian tradition for upholding authority related to seniority, especially male seniority, is slowly disappearing. It has often been pointed out that the average age of China's leaders at the central level is falling with every new generation, and the same tendency may be observed at the lower levels of the political administration. The “grass root cadres” (jiceng ganbu), including the village head and the party secretary, are expected to retire at the age of 60, but the government encourages earlier retirement to prevent the accumulation of power over a longer period of time with a few elderly villagers.

However, as the following examples show, in the context of a variety of local political and economic decision-making processes in rural China, the older (mainly male) segment of society is frequently consulted by officials, and the old men have a certain capacity to utilise their traditional and customary authority to extend their influence beyond both official institutions and personalised informal guanxi relations. This also makes these people an especially important support group for younger Party and government officials who are under increasing pressure from “ordinary” people whose acceptance of local political leadership cannot be taken for granted. The government's insistence on the local establishment of Old People's Associations (Laoren xiehui, hereafter OPA) may, therefore, be understood not merely as a move to help old people to organise themselves, but as an attempt to channel local traditional authority into an organisation intimately related to the Party and the government.

Non-Governmental Organisations and the Re-empowerment of the Old

The Chinese term minjian zuzhi is used to describe a variety of organisations perceived as “popular” (minjian) as opposed to governmental. While many of the emerging organisations working to improve the environment, provide legal aid, or train and educate migrants in the cities may be regarded as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), they are still obliged to register and they depend on gaining official acceptance as a legal “popular organisation”. However, as shown in the abundant literature on civil society in China, many of these “popular organisations” are in fact closely related to, or even part of, the formal government/Party structure.Footnote ⁷ In the Chinese discourse, they are called “popular organisations” first of all because they do not have any clear formal power directly related to the government or Party. They are minjian, popular, in the sense that they are set up in the express interest of specific segments of the min, the people, and they are, in principle, run by representatives of these people rather than by officially appointed government or Party officials.

One of the “popular organisations” that is officially supposed to be set up in rural areas is OPA. My intention with the following discussion is not to decide whether or not an organisation such as OPA should be regarded as a form of civil society in the sense of the concept developed from European history. The aim is to show how such a semi-formal organisation with no official power may locally nevertheless become an economically and politically much more important institution than was originally intended. It may become a focal point in a complex web of interests stemming from government officials, Party representatives, outside investors and local people, all of whom act not merely on the basis of rational choice but also according to habitual and customary practices.

It is mainly in the South of China that OPAs are functioning in practice and have become relatively influential locally. This might well be related to the fact that lineage ties and organisations have a strong history in these areas, and that these relatively new government institutions aimed at promoting the interests of old people fit well into a traditional structure where the heads of lineages were locally very powerful.Footnote ⁸ As suggested in an interesting study of a Southern rural area by Wang Xiaoyi and Zhu Chengbao, the integration of traditionally strong lineage organisations into the government-initiated OPA has made it easier for the government itself to control and direct the influence of the local clans (Wang and Zhu Reference Wang, Zhu, Jiyuan and Herrmann-Pillath1996). As pointed out by another Chinese scholar, He Xuefeng, OPA is by no means equivalent to the traditional and non-governmental Zu laohui, associations of old clan members, found in many Southern villages in China (He Reference Xuefeng2004). OPA was established as an official “unit” (danwei) connected to village committees from the mid-1980s onwards by the Communist government, but in most areas it was only during the 1990s that OPA in reality was started and sometimes gained importance. Since their establishment, the government has several times called for the standardisation of OPA's ways of operating, and the latest “standardisation” (guifanhua) of OPA took place in 2004, reflecting the government's increasing emphasis on challenges facing the state with regard to its old population.

The original aim of OPA was to create a forum for village people above the age of 60 (55 for women) where they could meet and enjoy their otium, while also supporting each other in cases of abuse. In the south of China, OPAs often have their centres in local temples. Officially, OPA should help to ensure the rights of the old and intervene in cases where children seriously break the commonly accepted norms of “filial piety” (xiao) and reject to do their duties as off-spring; or in (often reported) cases where the relationship between mother and daughter-in-law creates serious family problems (He Reference Xuefeng2004). OPA is often responsible for organising and carrying out local burial rituals, and for organising local important festivals such as Qingming jie, which is first of all a celebration and honouring of ancestors.Footnote ⁹ There is, however, also an important ideological and moral side to the official purpose of OPA as clearly expressed, for instance, in a governmental document from Zhejiang Province. This document explains that in addition to helping the poor, the handicapped and those others in need, OPA should help to promote the socialist society, its politics and spirit (Zhejiang Retired Workers Committee 2004). Throughout this document the close relationship between OPA as a popular organisation and the official local government institutions is emphasised. OPA should voluntarily work together with the leadership of the Party and the Village Committee (village government), and more specifically it should mediate in cases of local disputes. It should help to implement the contested policy of birth control, and promote the understanding and acceptance of the unpopular policies on burial procedures (ibid.). OPA is, in other words, obliged to use the traditional authority of older people to promote and support specific policies of the government. The document also explains the “three should not” (san wu) of OPA: No old people should risk death due to abuse or maltreatment; no old people should gamble or take drugs; no old people should take part in religious sects and superstitious activities (ibid.).

Although OPA is designated, both officially and by several Chinese researchers, as a “popular organisation”, it is not surprising, based on the above information, that the association is normally run by retired Party or government officials. This helps to secure a continued political influence from retired cadres and the oldest generation in the village, but it is first of all an important way for the government to make use of the traditional prestige and authority of old people, especially those who have previously had important positions in the government and Party while at the same time representing strong local clans. This is especially important in connection with local controversial policies such as the implementation of birth control, and the enforcement of the rule of cremation rather than the traditional and culturally important burial of the dead. Though often useful for the government, a study conducted by Luo Xingzuo of “popular organisations” in a southern Chinese village also shows that there is a considerable risk that local legal rule is weakened due to the real, but informal, power of semi-governmental organisations such as OPA (Luo Reference Luo2002).

The empirical data presented and discussed below present a complex picture of the power relations evolving around OPA and old people of special local importance. One of the purposes of OPA is clearly to promote and support the Communist Party's ideology and its specific local policies. Although it was never intended as an institution with any formal or even informal political power beyond this mandate, it benefits from its special status as an established institutionalised “popular organisation” run by the oldest people in the villages normally chosen among those who have retired from prominent positions in the local Party or the government.

While I argue in the following that local village governments and officials in the areas studied are increasingly depending on the traditional authority of old men to uphold their own political authority, one should also keep in mind that villagers' traditional respect and veneration for senior authority is likely to wane with the continued disintegration of previous tight-knit agriculturally based communities. An increasing number of peasants leave their land and take up work in towns and cities, villages become inhabited by old people and children mainly, and marriage is no longer the certain and predictable institution it used to be. As a result of such profound social changes, the relationship between the generations is also going through a continuous process of transformation.

The Difficult Road From Agriculture to Industry

Lotus VillageFootnote ¹⁰ is a typical Southern village where agriculture during the 1990s became less and less profitable, and an increasing number of people started to look for additional income in factories, construction work and the service sector. Due to the area's vicinity to Hong Kong, Taiwan and fast-developing Southern cities it has long been of particular interest for investors from Mainland China and other Asian countries. As in most other villages in the area, there were widespread discussions in the early 1990s about the possibilities for selling land to investors wanting to establish factories. As in many other areas of China, local officials were highly inclined to sell both collective and individually contracted village land, while villagers (although no longer having their main income from agriculture) were often more reluctant to give up their traditional source of income and insurance in case of bad times. Unlike many other villages in the area, Lotus Village, together with its two neighbouring villages, solved the issue of expropriation of land in 1993 without larger conflicts. All the people in these three villages (except for the recently arrived peasant-workers from other provinces and areas) belong to the same patrilineal surname group which we will here call “Guo”. In the mid-1990s these villages were still officially classified as “poverty villages” (pinkun cun). When the villages' governments were approached by a wealthy Taiwanese businessman wanting to invest and establish a factory in the neighbourhood, negotiations concerning the selling of land started. The businessman had ancestral roots in this particular region and came himself from the surname group Guo. He was deeply engaged in a transnational clan organisation and frequently came to his ancestral village to worship his lineage's ancestors. This was one of the stated reasons for this investor to buy up land from Lotus Village and establish a new factory there.

This phenomenon is well-known in China, where a large number of factories since the 1980s have been set up by overseas Chinese in towns or counties where they feel that they have cultural roots and family ties.Footnote ¹¹ According to Leo Douw, most foreign investments in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong have come from ethnic Chinese who are residing abroad but have cultural roots in the area (Douw Reference Douw, Douw, Huang and Godley1999). However, as Douw and others have also shown, this fact should not be taken as an argument for a special culturally based consensus among Chinese about how to handle and manage business. While many investors and managers argue that they have a special interest in cultivating their “hometown (qiaoxiang) ties”, research has shown that it is not plausible to analyse overseas ethnic Chinese business success in the People's Republic of China (or elsewhere) in the light of cultural affinity or identity (Douw Reference Douw, Cen and Godley1999: 3–4). One of the arguments made by Douw is that a businessman's cultivation of hometown ties first of all creates for him unique possibilities to connect to local officialdom and thereby facilitate the negotiation between economic and political power locally (ibid.: 4–5).

In Lotus Village, as in so many other villages and towns in South China, the discourse on hometown, lineage and cultural ties played an important role when the Taiwanese businessman Mr. Guo wanted to set up a factory in his ancestral home. This discourse helped to facilitate the cooperation between local government and the investor, and to convince the villagers, all of whom belonged to the Guo surname group, to accept that their land was bought up for a rather low price and used for industrialising purposes. When people locally talked to me about the establishment of the factory, they employed the common discourse on ancestral ties and explained that this investor wanted to “help” or “support” his home region by setting up a factory. Whatever his motives had been, this businessman was locally praised for having set up a factory and created workplaces in his ancestral home where people desperately needed to find jobs outside the agricultural sector.

Interestingly, when land from Lotus Village was finally sold to Mr. Guo, a contract was signed to ensure that villagers with the surname of Guo were guaranteed special treatment in connection with the recruitment of workers. This was a specific outcome of the local negotiations employing the discourse on the businessman's attempt to help and support the development of his ancestral home, and it was decisive for the final decision among the people to sell their land at a low price. A 50-year long contract was signed to seal a deal where land was handed over to this enterprise under the condition that factory jobs for a period of time were guaranteed to all villagers with the surname of Guo, below 30 years old, and with a minimum of 9 years of schooling. Initially the factory had 700–800 workers, and apart from the management staff all employees belonged to the Guo clan. However, due to the fast economic development in the region the factory grew faster than originally expected and other means of recruitment had to be introduced. By 2004, around 4,000 workers were employed in the factory, approximately 80% of them were women and about 1,500 belonged to the Guo surname-group. This particular factory—locally called “the Guo clan's enterprise”—was among the more technically modern ones in the region. Wages were considered to be relatively good with an average more than 1,000 Yuan per month, significantly more than the common 400–800 Yuan in the many local incense factories.Footnote ¹² In interviews, employees and other local people stressed that unlike many other enterprises, workers in this particular factory were paid overtime, they received partial refunds for necessary medicine, women were given 3 months of maternity leave with 60% of their basic wages, and the factory followed the regulations concerning insurance and pension fund. Wages were higher but discipline was also much stricter than in the less regulated factories often established by local people. In such factories, a worker's entire income was sometimes based on her daily production, and therefore people were also to a much higher extent free to come and go as they wished. They could also talk during working hours because their wages were directly related to individual production.Footnote ¹³ However, on the negative side, work in these factories was normally dirty, tiresome, and hazardous to health. Few locals wanted jobs in such factories that therefore largely depended on workers from other provinces or poorer mountain areas.

Comparative studies of working conditions in factories owned by People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong companies have strongly refuted earlier culturalist claims that a specific Confucian cultural tradition naturally creates a harmonious business tradition. Anita Chan, in her thorough studies of labour and working conditions in China, has shown beyond doubt that workers in both Chinese and foreign companies in China are exploited, and that management relies heavily on coercive discipline regardless of the ethnicity of the enterprise owners.Footnote ¹⁴ This was also the case in the factory of Lotus Village. Still, this did not prevent local people from regarding those workers who were employed in this particular factory as being privileged, first of all due to the wages offered. Agriculture provided very few working opportunities in this area, and to start small shops or independent enterprises one needed capital. Competition to get into the larger factories was therefore often hard, and many factories preferred to employ people from other areas or provinces because they tended to demand lower wages and were more willing to accept long working hours and harsh conditions.

The Guo-enterprise, as a modern factory with a high level of technology producing for the foreign market, had a quite good reputation locally in spite of the widespread scepticism towards what was popularly referred to as its “Japanese management methods” and the hardship associated with them.Footnote ¹⁵ Again, the discourse on lineage and home town affiliation was actively employed when local villagers told about how the Guo director first of all wanted to help people from his own ancestral land by employing people of his own surname group. However, seen from the factory management's perspective there were obvious disciplinary advantages of the special recruitment policies. As one man, married to a female worker (named Guo) in the factory, said: “This company has a bad shortcoming (huai maobing)! If one worker makes a serious mistake or misbehaves, all of his closest relatives will be fired with him”. This was not entirely true, but the factory did practice a system by which all employees were structured in groups of three people who would all be the target of disciplinary actions (for instance, deduction of wages) in case one made a major mistake or failed to deliver properly. While the recruitment policy had ensured support for the factory from the local people of the same surname as the founder, it also created a possibility for the management to enforce a strict disciplinary regime where family members controlled each other, and where collective punishment was an integrated method. As discussed in the following, the traditional authority of old men was strategically employed both by the management of the factory in order to carry out this recruitment policy and to enforce discipline, and by the government/Party in order to secure popular support for its own policies.

Making Use of Senior Authority

As discussed above, the senior members of local society in the villages of Fujian were organised by the government since the 1990s in the “popular organisation” called Old People's Associations. What were the implications of this for the Guo-enterprise wanting to make use of traditional forms of authority to discipline workers and ensure a convenient recruitment policy? In Lotus Village OPA was not established until 1998, but years before that another association for old people, “The old people's coordinating association”, had been set up within the Guo-factory. One important purpose of both of these two associations for old people was to channel the traditional authority of old men, especially those from important lineages and with previous political positions, into organisations where this kind of authority could more easily be combined with official political power (as in the case of OPA) or economic power (as in the case of the “coordinating association” in the factory). In addition, a third kind of association also mostly run by retired men was common in the area, namely the clan associations (zhongzu hui) which transgressed provincial and sometimes even national borders. Most larger surname groups in the area had established such clan associations by the late 1990s, and the oldest and most influential members participated in larger and smaller meetings, mostly organised by older men from the clan.

While Lotus village was somewhat special (though by no means unique) due to the factory-established old people's association, it was in other respects representative of the relations between OPA, Party, government and retired people with previous important official positions or positions in clan associations, in the south of China. In Lotus Village OPA was set up when the government felt an increasing need to organise old people and institutionalise the kind of prestige and authority they represented locally. And, similarly the manager of the Guo-factory recognised his need for making use of the widely accepted senior authority in a systematised way. The head of OPA was a retired Party secretary, Secretary Guo, who had been the local Party secretary since the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and, with shorter interruptions, all the time through the Cultural Revolution up to the reform period. In 1987, according to himself, he had to step down due to the government's new policy of “youthification” (nianqinghua) of leadership. Secretary Guo was in all ways a local figure of great political importance in the recent history of the village, and he was, in addition, a respected representative of the Guo clan. To supplement his leadership of OPA, there were three vice-leaders all of whom had also previously been employed as local officials. A proof to OPA's real—though informal—political importance was the fact that the current Party secretary (a younger man in his 50s) was nominated as a fourth vice-leader of OPA despite his relatively young age.

The structure of the “coordinating association” established within the private Guo-enterprise was built upon representation from the oldest people in three nearby Guo-villages. By and large, the people already in charge of OPA in these three villages expanded their power further when they simultaneously became in charge of the factory's internal “coordinating association”. This group included the oldest and traditionally most prestigious men from the villages, Party secretaries, and at least one village leader (cunzhang). Ingeniously, the private enterprise thereby established important direct connections to the local Party branches, to the local village governments, as well as to the oldest, most prestigious men in local society. The “coordinating association”, like OPA, did not possess any formal independent power to make important decisions. However, in the local context the association contained the very key to potential workers' entrance into the factory, and for the factory management it constituted a tool to ensure and enforce discipline and a stable working environment.Footnote ¹⁶

The factory's “coordinating association” was given the special task of assisting in the recruitment of local workers with the name of Guo for the factory. This also meant that the old people representing the association felt—and eventually would be held—personally responsible in case of disciplinary breaches. The retired officials from the village in reality gained the power to recruit a large part of the workers to this factory, and the power to engage in disputes with workers breaking rules or not living up to the factory's required standards. People locally sometimes mixed up the two associations—OPA and the “coordinating association”—and therefore one interviewee, for instance, complained that the retired officials and current leaders of OPA, through its monopoly on worker recruitment, had created for themselves a new basis for income. A number of people claimed that the old men would charge a fee from workers whom they were able to get into the factory. Workers signing up for work had to pay a deposit and in case they were provided work, a sum approximately equivalent to 1 month's wages had to be handed over to the association. It was impossible to prove the validity of this kind of information, and other interviewees, while acknowledging that such actions had indeed taken place before, claimed that enrolment procedures were now much more strictly regularised.

In any case, the “coordinating association” was first of all expected to give priority to potential employees belonging to the owner's own surname group, and since the factory was popular among local people also from other lineages and villages, this created a basis for the well-known “pulling of connections” (la guanxi) and “opening of the backdoor” (kai houmen) to get into the factory. At the same time, due to the focus on surname, locality and connection to people already affiliated to the factory, the recruitment policy of workers was considered by local interviewees to be highly efficient in terms of ensuring a stable workforce and preventing protest against working conditions and internal disputes among workers. Workers who were related to each other or came from the same villages, and were introduced to their jobs through the oldest most prestigious men with direct relations to the political leadership, were not very likely to get into conflict with the factory management. In case of major conflicts they would have no way of escaping reprisal from family members or neighbours. The recruitment system worked as a way of preventing the high labour turnover that Chan and Zhu in a survey found to be one of the main concerns of factory owners in China, and one of the owners' main arguments for introducing strong disciplinary measures, for instance monetary penalties, if workers left their jobs (Chan and Zhu Reference Chan and Zhu2003).

Conflicts of Land and Senior Authority

The strategic use of senior authority by both government and private enterprise was by no means coincidental. It was one of several symptoms of the fragile state of local government's status and ability to rule the rural areas in a period of very rapid economic and social change in the direction of increased individualisation and disintegration of rural communities. People in the villages generally expressed a very low degree of trust in local political leaders' ability to work in the best interest of villagers. At the same time, people were well aware that a number of social, economic and political issues relevant for themselves needed to find collective solutions. In the South China villages I rarely heard anyone who was not himself very closely related to a local official say anything good about the cun ganbu, the local officials. People in the villages elected their own leaders but this was clearly no guarantee for increased trust in official leadership. As one young woman explained: “Say you have three candidates. Each of them goes out to convince family members and friends to vote for them and they will give presents, even money, to secure their votes. People here do not care about ability (bu kan nengli), they care about their own profits (kan liyi).” People often laughed when asked about the relevance of local elections, and it seemed as if anyone running as a candidate for election was immediately suspected for having ulterior motives.Footnote ¹⁷ Several interviewees pointed out that not many people wanted, or dared, to be local leaders anymore. Being a local leader you were prevented from leaving the area to make money. Moreover, you were faced with all kinds of trouble (mafan) and people expected special favours from you. The widespread and outspoken mistrust of local officials in fact made the work of recently elected leaders difficult, even in those cases where they were explicitly working to repair damages of previous corrupt practices. Both the local villagers, the elected local leaders, and the local Party leadership increasingly needed back-up from locally respected men of senior authority, and these were normally represented by the elderly men who traditionally belonged to families of special importance, and whose individual characters made them trusted and respected. Often such people had the experience of occupying prominent official positions locally, but since they were now retired and supposed to be able to rise above their own immediate economic interests, this—ironically—seemed only to secure their trust among many people.

In one larger local dispute in the neighbourhood of Lotus village about the selling of land, the importance of a local group of senior men again became obvious. In this village, previous local leaders had sold large amounts of land for industrialising purposes in the mid-1980s. At that time prices were low but nearly 20 years later the main problem was that villagers insisted that they had never received their rightful share of income. Each household had indeed received a very small amount of money, and some of the money had been spent for collective purposes in the village, but a rather large sum had “disappeared”. Numerous stories were told about how families had lost nearly all their land without proper compensation and everybody, including people related to the government and Party, seemed to acknowledge these earlier mistakes. However, those who had been active in these transactions were now dead and no papers proving the existence of the money were available.

Since the late 1990s, prices of land had gone up and the officials from this village now wanted to sell more land in order to promote local economic development and industrialisation. The inhabitants were extremely anxious about this policy because they had been cheated before and did not trust the leaders' intentions even though they had had nothing to do with the previous transactions and had all been recently elected. A number of meetings were held with representatives from each household, and often huge discussions, quarrels and almost fightings developed.Footnote ¹⁸ In this conflict it was absolutely crucial for the local government and Party leaders to work through OPA and its senior leadership. It would, of course, have been possible for the government to seek help from some of the older men even if OPA had not been established. However, the fact that senior authority had been officially acknowledged through the establishment of an organisation such as OPA created for the government and Party leaders a formalised and convenient way of engaging traditional authority in the debate and thereby securing the support not only of the old men themselves but to a larger extent also of the villagers who trusted them.

The same strategy was employed in connection with another policy, decided on a higher level of administration, and directed at preventing people from “inviting guests” (qing ke) during the yearly most lively local festivals. The two traditional larger local festivals were cut down to one by the provincial government, and people were asked to stop inviting guest during this event. The government's rationale was that people spent too much money on guests during this festival, they drank too much, came into fighting, and drove their vehicles under the influence of alcohol with a number of traffic accidents as a result. To enforce such a policy that directly interfered in families' and individuals' social lives, officials were completely dependent on the cooperation and persuasive power of the old men. Having organised these men in the semi-official “popular” organisation of OPA made it possible for the governments to call upon the cooperation of the old men running the local OPAs in order to make use of their prestige.Footnote ¹⁹

This was a strategically wise move because while local people were extremely critical towards their official leadership they were much more inclined to respect the oldest segment of their society, especially when represented by old men with previous official positions and with high personal prestige. Younger people—men and women—often referred to these older men's ability to “speak up” (hui shuo hua) and “reason” (jiang daoli), and to the fact that when they interfered and said how things were supposed to be people still listened and obeyed (tamen shuo jiu suan le). As one of the elderly and most influential men in one village himself pointed out, in the most controversial issues such as those concerning the selling of land “the younger officials do not dare to speak up because they are afraid of the villagers and their opinions. Only the old, retired men are able to rise above such concerns and insist on decisions made on behalf of the entire village.” This view was confirmed by many villagers of different age and occupation. Even some of the young men in their 20s and 30s who had been strongly engaged in local criminal activities (gambling, fighting, prostitution, etc.) expressed their respect for these older men.Footnote ²⁰ Local people would even ask OPA to carry out inspections of companies doing collective work in the villages (water pipelines, for instance), because unlike the private or government-supported companies doing inspection work, OPA and the old men connected to it were believed not to cheat in their own favour. It is therefore not surprising that the government, and also at least one private factory, would consciously engage OPA and the old men running it into their activities. In the Southern villages of this study, OPA has, in many ways, become indispensable for the younger officially appointed leaders, because the old people connected to OPA enjoy a kind of popular and culturally inherited prestige that local officials lack and currently seem to be unable to substitute at least in some matters of local political importance.