As frequent, violent, and organized peasant protests show, China’s reform regime has lost its once all-powerful control in the countryside. The sharp decline of village cadres’ positional authority in allocating economic resources, which began in post-Mao decollectivization, holds the key to explaining the change. Since the late 1990s, the collapse of village enterprises and the erosion of power over land have cost village cadres their remaining economic levers to engage the villagers as well as their incentives to work for the (...) party-state. The loss of the regime’s grip on village cadres and the loss of command by village cadres on peasants have almost synchronized, causing the traditional structure of organizational control to crumble in vast rural areas. In the new, prevailing patterns of village governance, party power is becoming increasingly irrelevant. (shrink)

At present, the feasibility of using self-purification mechanism to inhibit rumor spreading has been confirmed by studies from different perspectives. This paper improves the classical rumor spreading models with self-purification mechanism, analyzes the correlation between spreading threshold in the model and its self-purification level theoretically, and conducts numerical simulations to study the impact of the changes of model parameters on key indicators in the process of rumor spreading. The simulation results show that changes of model parameters, including self-purification level and (...) forgetting rate, exert significant influences on rumor spreading exactly. (shrink)