Over the last decade, there have been numerous reports of abusive township
officials collecting excessive fees from villagers. The most well known cases are
documented in A Survey of Chinese Peasants (Chen and Wu 2004) that details the brutal
and often violent methods township officials employ to collect fees in rural Anhui
province. Although these reports bring attention to serious problems of township
official’s abuse of local authority, they fail to address the legitimate functions of
township governments and how fees provide basic local services.
officials are thugs attempting to extract as much as they can from villagers. Township
officials are in a difficult position. They have to collect fees from individual residents (or
households) to provide local medical and educational services as well as collect taxes for
higher authorities. Although the township governments provide essential services, they
receive the brunt of villager dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, the increasing fees and non-
transparent tax system has contributed to rural discontent and at times unrest in the
countryside. In response, the national government enacted the Tax-for-Fee Reform
(TFR) that is designed to eliminate local fees, but the result has also reduced the
autonomy and governing capacity of township governments.
The TFR is a central government attempt to relive villagers of their tax and fee
burdens that have been eroding rural incomes throughout the 1990s and especially after
the1994 tax reform. The aim of the TFR is to streamline local revenue collection and
reduce villagers’ burdens by eliminating local fees altogether and utilizing a single
agricultural tax. The TFR was first introduced in Anhui province in 2000, and then
broadly introduced to other provinces in 2002, and early evidence suggests that villager
burdens in most rural areas have been dramatically reduced (China Daily 2005). While
1
The administrative hierarchy in China is national, provincial, municipal, county, town (township) and
village. The township (town) is the lowest administrative level in China.
2
Convention