The changing institutional space regarding roles and behavior of village leaders: an evolution from villagers’ autonomy to the power list

The rural society in China has undergone dramatic changes in the past four decades since the implementation of the policy of reform and opening-up. These changes are reflected in width, depth, and disparity. Width refers to the fact that they cover a wide range of aspects, such as politics, economy, society, culture, and mentality; depth refers to the fact that a suite of factors, including the market economy, industrialization, urbanization, population flow, and the Internet, alter the way that villagers make a living and the physical configuration of rural areas in a fundamental manner; disparity refers to the fact that changes in width and depth display a degree of differences in speed and pattern in different areas, as well as the structural difference in the process of resource reallocation (many villages may well vanish on the horizon). At this grand countryside stage, many actors play various roles. Village leaders are brought into the limelight due to their indispensable status, thus, becoming the subject of this research. We seek to explore the roles and behavior of village leaders from the perspective of modernization of rural governance within the framework of the state–society relationship. Precisely speaking, we focus our research on those village leaders who grasp opportunities for development or take the lead during the course of dramatic changes. This article is comprised of three parts. Part 1 presents a brief discussion about the concept of village leaders and outlines a schema delineating their roles and behavior on the grounds of literature review. Unlike existing studies, we focus on the institutional space aimed at normalizing their roles and behavior rather than their specific roles and behavior. It is of vital importance that the behavior of village leaders should be normalized and effective institutions should be formulated in the modernization of rural governance. Thus, Part 2 is primarily concerned about the institutional construction of the roles and behavior of village leaders. Part 3 serves as a recapitulation and carries out further discussions.