Aspects of Local Government and Politics in China: 1955-1958.

The article discusses aspects of local government and politics in China during 1955 to 1958. A description of China's political system lacks balance if it is preoccupied with its centralized, efficient, monolithic control aspects. A considerable amount of politics occurs on the local level. There is a great deal of variation and subtlety in the Chinese political system. Almost wherever one looks in local government, one sees the need to make distinctions--between central tasks and subsidiary tasks, between the backgrounds, skills, and values of different local officials, and between vertical functional control and horizontal party control. The local political process worked quite differently in early 1957, when the centre fostered a climate, which tolerated a certain amount of debate, than in early 1958, when the centre issued its clarion call for the Great Leap Forward. There were important differences between local levels, namely, the country, the district, the township, and the cooperative. This article has tended to lump these levels together. Temporal differences, variations among systems, and distinctions between levels added to the complexity of local government.