In the immediate aftermath of the rural reforms in the 1980s, there was a quick and initial decline in the power of the CCP. Rural self-governance at the village level began to emerge. In the 1990s, however, there was an explicit and substantial effort to “re-build” the CCP in rural China. Any progress that had been made in the direction of improving self-governance in rural China was eroded by the fiscal and administrative recentralization.
