Constructing Consent: How Grassroots Governments Reshape the State–Peasant Relationship in the Xi Era

Abstract After the rural tax and fee reform in China in the 2000s, the increased administrative nature of rural governance weakened state–peasant connections, rendering local cadres’ traditional societal-oriented consent strategies ineffective. To gain peasants’ consent to state policies and reconnect with them, grassroots officials adopted a more complex, covert and naturalized strategy for constructing consent, integrating it into peasants’ daily lives. This study uses the “rural construction” initiative in Chuxi county, China, as a case study to explore the construction of consent. The findings indicate that constructing peasant consent is a process of continuous interaction between the individual actor and social structures. In the regularization phase, grassroots officials use institutional practices to facilitate consent, including winning the hearts and minds of villagers, solving “thought” problems, shaping behavioural norms and cultivating lower-level agents. In the mobilization phase, when consent is needed, grassroots officials flexibly adapt the pre-established institutional elements to elicit specific consent. They do this by fostering an atmosphere of consent, employing divide-and-rule tactics, and contextualizing rules. The study concludes that the party-state is building a broader form of peasant consent in the Xi era, which extends beyond consent to policies.