The Campaign Rolls On: Rural Governance in China under Xi Jinping and the War on Poverty

The broad aim of this article is to analyse the institutions of China’s rural local in their own right, and thus further our understanding of the political social mechanisms that maintain and support them. What changes do rural ’ evolving notions of “development” and “modernisation” under Xi Jinping ? What shifts can we detect? This article focuses on two developments under : the increased role of the Party-led “leading small groups” in Chinese local , and Xi’s “war on poverty”, which aims to lift all Chinese citizens out poverty by 2020 through a mixture of targeted fiscal support and compulsory of millions of rural residents. Examining these developments sheds some into Xi’s efforts to remodel the Chinese polity and society. Do they represent real break with past practice, or do they provide evidence of continuity with trends in China’s institutions of rural governance?