Jie Lu has written an impressive first book on why some villages are better governed than others. Varieties of Governance in China exemplifies many of the best features of good scholarship: it is embedded in the existing literature, both China-specific and comparative studies; its research design includes a mix of quantitative data from a representative survey of 356 villages across China and qualitative case studies of a select number of villages; and it clearly links the empirical findings to both theoretical debates and policy discussions. Above all, it offers a valuable original contribution: by showing how outward migration affects the social and political institutions of villages and in turn influences the quality of village governance, Lu emphasizes a dynamic aspect of village life not captured by other studies of rural governance.
In order to explain why some villages but not others provide indoor tap water, paved roads, well-maintained irrigation systems, public facilities such as schools, and other benefits of public welfare, Lu contrasts two types of institutions: “indigenous relation-based informal institutions” such as clans and “imposed rules-based formal institutions” such as village elections. This will sound reminiscent of Lily Tsai's work on village governance, but Lu's study has different findings: he finds that solidary groups like clans have no impact on public goods provision, but that elections do have a strong and positive effect. More importantly, he finds that the extent of outward migration has significant implications for the communal structure of villages and in turn the nature of their governance. When migration is relatively low, villages are likely to be close-knit and rely on indigenous informal institutions for governance. When migration is medium, villages become loosely coupled and rely on formal political institutions such as elections. But when migration is high, villages become atomized and villagers resort to private solutions to gain public goods, resulting in a low quality of governance. This is an important contribution, because outward migration has been a pervasive trend for the past few decades, although its impact on village governance has not been analyzed in such a rigorous way.
Lu concludes that the decision on how to improve rural governance is not simply a choice between informal and formal institutions. By embedding the problem of local governance in the changing social environment of China's villages, “the lack of a universally applicable institutional solution for effective local governance should no longer be of concern” (p. 199). Both informal indigenous institutions and externally imposed formal institutions can provide effective governance, but they do not perform the same in every context. In atomized villages with high levels of migration and where neither clans nor elections are effective means of providing public goods, he suggests the need to promote community interests as a precondition for strong institutions and in turn better governance.
Lu's book is not simply a replication of Tsai's work, and their findings are not strictly comparable. This is largely due to several methodological reasons. First, he converts most of his variables into dichotomous variables, even when they were originally measured in ordinal or continuous ways. For example, the quality of elections is measured in four ways: how the village election committee is organized, how candidates are nominated, how the final slate of candidates is determined, and whether there are multiple candidates for elected positions. Rather than use a summary index, Lu uses a binary variable: only when all four measures comply with the Organic Law of Village Committees are villages coded as 1; all others are coded as 0. The same strategy is used for all five types of public goods and the strength of indigenous informal institutions. While this approach may have advantages, it also eliminates useful variation on key variables and may not accurately capture the relationships between them. Second, the methodological choices made, especially dichotomizing variables and specifying models, are not always clearly explained, making it difficult for those not well-versed in quantitative methods to interpret the findings he presents. Third, the case studies are too brief to provide tests of Lu's hypotheses, and instead mainly serve to illustrate the findings from the village surveys. Finally, the close-kit nature of villages is not defined simply in terms of clans and other solidary groups, but rather the presence of “frequent and continuous interaction” among villagers and “dense and extended social networks” (pp. 22–26). The extent of migration disrupts these interactions and networks to different degrees, and thus how and how well public goods are provided. This seems to assume that villages were similarly close-knit before migration began, an assumption that runs contrary to other studies. Consider the counter-factual: in the absence of migration, how would the quality of governance vary across these villages?
These methodological concerns notwithstanding, this is an original and well-designed study with important findings. By adding the effects of outward migration to the usual institutional and structural qualities of villages, Lu incorporates the key factor that is transforming, for better or worse, many of China's villages. His work deserves to be read by all those interested in issues of governance and the dynamic features of village life brought on by the massive flow of villagers out of their villages.
