e China Quarterly (2025), 1–15 doi:10.1017/S0305741025000232 RESEARCH ARTICLE Shouldering the Burden: The Communist Party’s Deepening Penetration into Village China Ben Hillman Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Email: ben.hillman@anu.edu.au Abstract Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China has systematically centralized decision-making power over a wide range of policy areas while strengthening the organizational capacity of Party institutions to implement the Party’s agenda. e Party has expanded its presence and influence across government agencies, private enterprise and non-profit organizations. e final frontier for Party control lies in the countryside, where villages have enjoyed relative autonomy and civic organizational status since decollec- tivization in the early 1980s. is article explains how the Party has systematically deepened its penetration into China’s villages by empowering village-level Party branches and Party agents to take control of village affairs. e policies have sought to turn village committees into party-state implementation agencies, but messy realities on the ground raise questions about the efficacy of the measures for policy implementa- tion and formal Party control. Drawing on interviews with villagers, village leaders and township officials in several rural Chinese counties in western and eastern parts of China, alongside Party documents and Chinese-language academic journal articles, this article examines the Party’s strategy for taking greater control of China’s 600,000 plus villages and presents observations about the impacts and consequences of the recent centralization initiatives for rural governance in China. 摘要 在习近平的领导下, 中国共产党系统地将决策权集中并广泛地运用到各个政策领域, 同时加强了党 内机构实施、执行党的纲领。党扩大了其在政府机构、私营企业和非营利组织中的存在和影响 力。党控制的最后阵地是农村, 自20世纪80年代初非集体化以来, 农村集体一直享有相对的自治权 和民间组织地位。本文解释了党如何通过授权村级党支部和党代表来控制村务, 如何系统地加深 对中国农村的渗透。这些政策试图将村委会变成党和国家的执行机构, 但各农村当地混乱、复杂 的实地情况致使人们对这些措施在实施过程和党的正式控制效果方面产生了怀疑。本文通过对中 国东西部多个农村县的村民、村干部和乡镇官员的走访, 以及党的文件和中文学术期刊文章, 探 讨了党对中国６０多万个村庄加强控制的战略, 并提出了对近期中央集权举措对中国农村治理的影 响和后果的观察 Keywords: Chinese Communist Party; Party building; rural governance; village cadres; village democracy; village leaders 关键词: 中国共产党; 党建; 乡村治理; 村干部; 乡村民主; 村主任 During the week of 24–28 April 2023, the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party organized its first nationwide training programme for China’s village leaders. Offered via video link to village Party secretaries and village leaders (cun zhuren 村主任), the training sessions were held in 3,568 sub-classrooms across the country and included Central Party School video presentations and offline seminars focused on Party building for the purpose of rural revitalization and making © e Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London. is is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741025000232 Published online by Cambridge University Press