China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently conducted a rare training session for village officials nationwide. Experts have suggested the move would be part of the CCP’s attempts to address its power crisis resulting from intensified conflicts in rural areas.
The training catered to all village party organization secretaries and village committee directors nationwide, with the primary training classes set up in Beijing and 3,568 sub-classrooms distributed at provincial and county Party schools (administrative colleges) and related training institutions.
Ministerial officers from the Party School, the Organization Department of the Central Committee, the Secretary Bureau of the Central Agricultural Office, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, and the Bureau of Law and Legal Governance of the Ministry of Justice delivered speeches or lessons via video broadcast.
“This is the first time that the CCP has conducted training directly for all village leaders in the country, and it is also the most extensive training event for rural grassroots cadres in recent years,” Xinhua’s report said.
Such rare training reflects “the crisis of grassroots political power that has alarmed Zhongnanhai, the seat of CCP’s decision-making core in Beijing,” U.S.-based current affairs commentator Li Yanming told The Epoch Times on May 18.
China’s social contradictions and conflicts “is now concentrated in the countryside, and it is escalating,” according to U.S.-based political and economic analyst Lu Tianming, who also expressed a similar opinion to The Epoch Times that this training is designed to strengthen the CCP’s leadership of village cadres in its governance crisis.
Lu held that the CCP convened village officials nationwide for so-called training with two main purposes, “One is to let them [village officials] bridle the jobless people at the grassroots level.” The other is that barbaric “agricultural management” in rural areas has promoted strains and clashes between cadres and villagers.
“The CCP requires these village officials to appease local farmers to avoid inflaming conflicts,” Lu said.
“The return of massive jobless workers to the countryside was a destabilizing social factor for the communist rulers, and they fear it will affect their rule,” Lu said.
Rural Enforcement
“Rural enforcement (or nongguan農管 in Chinese)” has become a buzzword on the Chinese internet this year, accompanied by the acceleration of the CCP’s policy of “restoring forests to farmlands.”“Restoring forests to farmlands” requires farmers to cut down trees and plant crops instead. The move is a complete reversal of CCP’s previous approach of “returning farmland to forests,” which has been in place for over 20 years after floods swept through China, affecting millions of people in 29 provinces between June and August 1998.
Lu pointed out that China is facing an increasingly severe food crisis, and the CCP is relying on “rural enforcement” to carry out its new strategy to speed up the release of more arable fields.
“This phenomenon is severe among village cadres and rural enforcement staff, and they do not talk about the law or reason,” said Li Yanming. “The Communist Party’s grassroots regime has long been criticized as an organized crime syndicate.”
Bloody Cases
Since May of this year, Chinese media have reported three consecutive incidents of villagers stabbing village cadres in northern and northeastern China, involving 18 deaths and one injury.A local source said that the suspect, surnamed Jin, 64, was a farmer in the village who had a clash with a neighbor over a land dispute.
Out of anger at the village chief for favoring his relatives in dealing with the land dispute, Jin first stabbed the village chief’s relatives. The village chief was out that day, and the village chief’s wife was killed.
The suspect, Jia Qiang, was the deputy director of the education department of Changqing No. 1 Middle School. His daughter was molested by Liu’s son, who was detained after Jia Qiang called the police. Liu used his contacts and connections to get his son out of police custody soon after. After that, Liu’s son kept harassing Jia’s daughter until the girl was driven crazy. Jia killed himself after killing the entire Liu family.
Liu was 63 years old when he was killed, his wife 37, and his son 16.
The report said 38-year-old Xu Guoqiang and the village cadre had quarreled before but didn’t mention for what reason. On May 1, Xu went to the village cadre’s home and killed the village cadre and three others, then fled in his car until he was arrested at a hotel in Taiyuan, Shanxi, on May 4.
“The foundation of the CCP’s authoritarian rule is crumbling,” Li Yanming said.
Li said China’s rural problems are closely intertwined with the food, population, unemployment, and economic crises. He said it’s further brewing to become social and political turmoil.
