This suggests that finding ways to respond and solve problems is the source of rule change, both foreign and domestic.The social basis of XW Village’s support for the new rules comes from their effectiveness in solving real problems. The facilitation of individuals (e.g., the new village director) may have been important before the new rules took shape, but once the rules were implemented, systematic mutual constraints transcended individual roles. The series of changes we see – the emergence of cooperative behavior between conflicting groups, the reduction of confrontation, the increase in decision output and smooth implementation, the reduction of cadre conflicts, the beginning of the growth of shared social capital, and so on – can hardly be attributed to the role of individual coordination. The best example is the general increase in commitment credibility: in response to the deliberative council’s decision, all implementation processes were not obstructed by any one group of villagers again, apparently not because G successfully persuaded to stop the two groups of villagers from fighting each other, but as a result of the above-mentioned system of public rules working.
In the language of the study, the basic effect of this new rule was to establish public relations as an alternative to group relations, making the uncertainty of public asset disposal – information concealment, in-circle reciprocity, unknown outcomes, high susceptibility to suspicion and competition for control – more certain Desirable. In layman’s terms, villagers on both sides feel visible, articulate and reassured. This is the reason why trust and cooperation between conflicting groups in XW villages has emerged.
Is this the growth of social capital? One might argue that interpersonal trust and cooperation takes a longer time to accumulate because it relies on knowledge of people – the objects of trust and cooperation – and that knowledge requires history, time and experience. So cooperation formed over a short period of time does not necessarily imply the expansion of social capital, and trust and cooperation may disappear once the contract period is over, e.g., once G, the head of XW’s village, leaves, the two factions may continue to fight. This perception of social capital comes from the limited experience of personal relationships. There is no doubt that there is a high level of “social capital” within individuals or close groups, but the nature of privileged social capital is different from sharable social capital, which is a public good with properties shared across individual or group relationships and applicable to the realm of public affairs. As we have seen, there was never a shortage of privileged “social capital” in the previous XW villages, but they did not serve to “enhance certainty” in the conduct of public affairs. While privileged social capital is generally based on knowledge of people – it is impossible to build up trust and cooperation without long-term acquaintance – universal social capital is based on knowledge of rules. and cooperation can emerge. There is ample evidence to support this, for example, private contracting has also a long history in China.
Thus, the widespread application of public rules will facilitate the growth of universal social capital. Public affairs issues are characterized by diverse personal associations, heterogeneous values and interests, mobile participants, changing opportunity environments, and so on. In the face of this complexity, the cost of knowing everyone through empirical history would be so high that it would be nearly impossible to achieve. So, unlike ad hoc social capital, which comes from trust in people, generic social capital must come from trust in rules. Trust in rules that are mutually agreed upon and experienced together is the basis on which cooperation among groups of people with different values and interests can occur. The corollary of this is the understanding that privileged social capital and universal social capital are two kinds of social capital based on different principles, which occur through different mechanisms and have different effects on public affairs.
Compared to the historical experience in Europe – the modern deliberative system – is more likely to arise in politically divided societies (Dincecco and Wang, 2018), what can be added in the case of the XW village is that the generation of new rules does require the competitive environment, but the existence of the conditions does not necessarily trigger the mechanism, as a split does not necessarily automatically result in an update of the rules. Intermediary mechanisms are also important, and it is quite possible that, were it not for the emergence of dilemmas that cannot be solved by the old methods, and were it not for the inability to envisage and willingness to choose alternative rules to solve them, the split would persist, as it did in the previous 20 years or so, when opposing sides, though confronted, adhered to the same principle of affinity. Such a conflict would appear to combat the corruption of decision-making on the opposing side without systematically building new principles to prevent recorruption; competition, but not of different principles; diametrically opposed, but not of different principles. As Hegel (2006) argues, this is (in situ) circularity, not history (progress).
The policy possibility of this question suggests that self-reform using the breakthrough of institutional rules can help to break the cycle of group conflict and competition for control and improve the quality of social governance at the grassroots level.
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