Catalyzed commoning: Boundary spanners and the politics of rural revitalization in China

Introduction

In the summer of 2019, I arrived at Heping Village ¹ to attend the annual members’ meeting of its Changrong Farmer Cooperative. The event was held in the village’s newly built square, connected by a wide new road to the cooperative’s office building. My host, Secretary Xu—a successful entrepreneur who had returned from Shanghai a decade earlier—presided over the proceedings. The day began with a tug-of-war between teams of farmers, followed by the distribution of free fertilizer. “This is a gift from the agricultural bureau,” Xu announced through a portable loudspeaker, “embodying the Communist Party’s concern.” Farmers lined up with wheelbarrows, some murmuring about the quality of the fertilizer, others focused on getting their share. During the official meeting that followed, Xu presented the year’s production figures, praised several success stories, and awarded two exemplary farmers with extra bags of fertilizer. The day concluded with a communal feast, where Xu, moving between tables, elaborated on the cooperative’s broader mission: since its founding in 2011, he explained, the cooperative had aimed not just to boost incomes but to rebuild the sense of collectivism lost after the de-collectivization reforms of the 1980s. Through these efforts, Heping had emerged as a model village for rural revitalization in Shandong Province.

This seemingly harmonious scene of collective endeavor, however, is laden with analytical tension. The call for grassroots “collectivism” is championed by a powerful returning entrepreneur vested with Party authority, while the cooperative’s handouts are clearly branded as gifts from the state. This vignette captures the lived reality of contemporary Chinese rural governance: a form of collective action engineered from above, rather than mobilized organically from below. This fusion of top-down power with bottom-up rhetoric crystallizes the central research questions of this article: How does collective action emerge in a community marked by deep social fragmentation and resource scarcity? And what is the nature of this “collectivism” when it is propelled not by the community itself, but by a dominant leader operating at the intersection of state and market?

To address these questions, I draw on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Heping Village, tracing how one leader’s interventions reshaped land, trust, and reputation. I argue that understanding Heping’s transformation requires moving beyond conventional frameworks of rural development. While the neo-endogenous approach rightly highlights the need to combine local resources with external networks (Bosworth et al., 2016; Gkartzios and Lowe 2019; Ray 2006), it often presumes a clearer distinction between “state” and “civil society” than exists in China. Here, the Party-state is not merely an external “exogenous” force but a pervasive actor deeply interwoven with local social dynamics, rendering simple dichotomies inadequate (Palmer and Winiger 2019; Xin and Gallent 2024).

To capture these dynamics, I develop the concept of “catalyzed commoning,” a mode of collective resource management that does not emerge organically from within a community but is actively engineered by a pivotal actor. In Heping, this catalyst is Xu, whom I analyze as a “boundary spanner” bridging the structural gaps between the bureaucratic logic of the state, the profit-driven logic of the market, and the socio-cultural logic of the village. However, as this study will demonstrate, catalyzed commoning is not a neutral technical fix. It is a profoundly political process that generates its own contradictions. Through an examination of land reorganization, the rebuilding of social capital, and the crafting of a “model village” image, I show how this leader-driven model successfully mobilizes resources and delivers tangible benefits, yet simultaneously generates a contentious “politics of revitalization” characterized by asymmetric power relations, selective inclusion, and a reliance on charismatic authority rather than broad-based democratic participation.

Ultimately, Heping’s story offers more than a local case study. It provides a lens into the shifting state-market nexus in contemporary China, revealing how the state governs the countryside through market mechanisms and entrepreneurial agents. It also raises critical questions about the sustainability and inclusivity of development models that depend heavily on elite catalysts to forge collective life—a dilemma that extends far beyond China’s borders.

Catalyzed commoning in the shadow of the state

To understand the transformation of Heping Village, it is necessary to first situate its predicament within the broader evolution of commons theory. Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work demonstrated that local communities can devise robust institutions for sustainable governance of common-pool resources (Ostrom 2015; Ostrom et al., 2002). Building on this, subsequent scholarship has shifted attention from the commons as a static entity to “commoning” as a dynamic social process, i.e., the ongoing practices of producing, maintaining, and negotiating shared resources (Bollier 2020; Federici 2018; Gibson-Graham et al. 2016; Linebaugh 2020). Here, commoning is often framed as a counter-movement to capitalist enclosure, a reclaiming of the means of livelihood from below.

Yet this framing, while analytically powerful, implicitly presumes what it seeks to explain: the existence of a functional “community” with sufficient social capital, shared norms, and capacity for self-organization. This presumption faces severe empirical challenges in the context of post-reform rural China. The country’s specific political economy has created a landscape that is paradoxically collective in name yet atomized in practice. The de-collectivization reforms of the early 1980s, epitomized by the Household Responsibility System (HRS), successfully unleashed individual productivity but simultaneously dismantled the organizational fabric of the village. Though land remains legally “collectively owned,” usage rights have become fragmented among households, leading to what scholars term a “tragedy of the anti-commons” (Heller 1998), where excessive fragmentation prevents the coordination necessary for modern agriculture. This structural fragmentation is compounded by profound social erosion. The massive out-migration of working-age labor has “hollowed out” (kongxinhua) villages, depleting the human capital and endogenous leadership essential for self-governance (Ye 2018).

Heping’s predicament, then, is not that it lacks the will to cooperate, but that it lacks the social infrastructure upon which classical commons theory depends. In such a context, the “neo-endogenous” development model celebrated in European rural studies, where communities autonomously leverage external networks (Gkartzios and Lowe 2019; Ray 2006), encounters significant limits. Under the national “Rural Revitalization” campaign, the state channels substantial resources into the countryside. However, unlike the egalitarian distribution of the socialist era, these resources are now allocated through a competitive “project system” or “project-based financing system” (xiangmu zhi) (Qu 2012; Zhou and Lian 2020). To secure project funds, villages must demonstrate “capacity” to absorb capital and fulfill state objectives. This has elevated the Farmers’ Specialized Cooperative (FSC) to a central position in rural governance. Since the 2007 FSC Law, the state has aggressively promoted FSCs as the primary vehicle to reintegrate smallholders into the market and serve as legitimate conduits for state subsidies.

Yet the proliferation of cooperatives in China has sparked intense debate over their nature and efficacy. A growing critical literature suggests that a significant proportion of registered FSCs diverge sharply from the international cooperative principles, operating instead as “elite-capture” models where cadres or wealthy farmers dominate decision-making, reducing ordinary members to passive suppliers or land-rentiers (Lammer 2012; Stanford 2018). ² However, dismissing these hybrid entities as merely “fake” or “failed” risks overlooking their sociological significance as functional developmental mechanisms. In hollowed-out villages like Heping, the elite-led cooperative is often the only viable structure for mobilizing resources. This study therefore moves beyond normative judgments of authenticity to examine how collective action is constructed under such a constrained environment. The structural paradox necessitates an external stimulus, namely, a catalyst (Younes 2024). This paper thus proposes the concept of “catalyzed commoning” to describe this distinct mode of collective action, one that does not emerge spontaneously from the grassroots but is actively engineered by pivotal actors who bridge fragmented communities with external systems.

I analyze these catalytic actors using the theoretical lens of the “boundary spanner” (Long et al. 2013; Williams 2002). It is crucial to distinguish the boundary spanner from the more common figure of the “broker” (Koster and Van Leynseele 2018; Lewis and Mosse 2006). While a broker typically facilitates transactions for personal gain without altering existing structures, a boundary spanner in catalyzed commoning plays a constitutive role. They do not merely transmit resources; they actively translate and reconfigure the conflicting logics of state bureaucracy, market efficiency, and village reciprocity into a new, hybrid institutional form. Secretary Xu did not simply bring Shanghai’s market to Heping; he remade Heping’s land and social relations to meet the market’s demands. This creative alignment, rather than simple intermediation, defines the catalytic function.

The figure of the “entrepreneurial village secretary” (nengren shuji) exemplifies this role. By embodying multiple identities simultaneously—Party agent, businessperson, and local kin member—such leaders mobilize resources inaccessible to either the state or atomized villagers alone. They “assemble” the cooperative not merely as an economic firm but as a political-economic alliance. However, as I argue throughout this article, this catalytic process is inherently political and power-laden. While effective in overcoming the inertia of “hollowing out,” it risks fostering a form of “strongman commoning,” that is, a mode of collective action that depends heavily on charismatic authority and vertical patronage rather than horizontal democratic institutionalization.

This reliance on the boundary spanner reflects a specific configuration of state-market relations where the state governs the countryside through capable elites. Understanding this dynamic not only shifts the analytical focus from asking “is this a true cooperative?” to “how are power and resources negotiated within this state-sanctioned, elite-driven commons?” It also calls for a revision of the very notion of “community” within commons theory. Rather than a pre-existing, cohesive foundation, this study reveals “community” in Heping as a profoundly stratified outcome of the catalyzing process itself. Therefore, “catalyzed commoning” represents not a return to organic self-governance, but a form of “derived commoning”: a pragmatic mechanism for contexts of social atomization, in which the capacity for collective action must be externally implanted and engineered rather than cultivated from within.

Methodology

This ethnography is based on 7 months of fieldwork in Heping Village, conducted primarily during two periods in 2019 and 2021. My engagement with the site began in 2018 as part of a broader survey of agrarian change in North China and deepened substantially in May 2019. It was during this visit, amid preparations for a high-profile provincial inspection, that Secretary Xu offered me a pivotal opportunity: “If you really want to learn something about rural society, follow me as my personal assistant.” Accepting this role granted me exceptional “backstage” access (Goffman 1959). For 4 months, I shadowed Xu to meetings, banquets, and negotiations, observing how he mobilized resources from the state’s “project system,” curated the village’s “model” image for visiting officials, and leveraged his personal networks to secure market channels. This vantage point proved essential for dissecting the mechanisms of “catalyzed commoning” from above, revealing precisely how the catalyst operates behind closed doors.

To counterbalance the inherent risks of elite proximity, I developed strategies for independent engagement. While involved in cooperative management, I consciously created spatial and social distance during downtime, venturing alone to nearby markets and neighboring villages to observe the broader economic ecosystem without an official escort. Recognizing that formal interviews could intimidate older, less-literate farmers, I adopted a “labor-as-method” approach, ³ joining farmers in their greenhouses to work alongside them. During hundreds of hours of pruning and harvesting, sharing the sweat and humidity, “official transcripts” faded, and farmers felt comfortable sharing anxieties over debt, frustrations with technical challenges, and nuanced views on the cooperative’s distribution of benefits. Relying on discreet mental notes and quick jottings on my phone during the day, I maintained extensive nightly fieldnotes, recording not only observed events but also my own emotional responses—a practice that forced me to confront my tendency to sympathize with the cooperative’s developmental logic and to consciously seek countervailing perspectives from marginal households.

To capture both elite and marginal perspectives, I combined participant observation with semi-structured interviews. I conducted extended interviews with all five cooperative leaders, 15 member households selected to reflect variation in greenhouse size and years of membership, and eight non-members identified through snowball sampling, including the elderly who had leased out their land and younger farmers who had chosen not to join. All interviews and conversations were conducted with informed consent, obtained verbally or in writing depending on the formality of the setting. By oscillating between the roles of the secretary’s assistant and a farm laborer, and by triangulating “frontstage” rhetoric with “backstage” realities, I was able to capture the defining tension of Heping’s transformation: the impressive efficacy of the catalyst in mobilizing resources, alongside the complex politics of inclusion and exclusion it engendered.

To be sure, my role as Xu’s personal assistant was a double-edged sword: it granted unparalleled backstage access but risked biasing my perspective toward elite rationales. Villagers may have filtered criticisms in my presence, and Xu himself viewed my presence partly as documentation of his success. I mitigated this through the strategies described above, yet the possibility of elite-induced bias cannot be fully eliminated. Furthermore, this is a single-village ethnography of an acknowledged “model village.” Heping’s transformation depends on a singular boundary-spanner—Secretary Xu—and a specific configuration of state-market conditions. My findings are not statistically generalizable. Rather, the value of this case lies in its “theoretical generalizability”: using Heping to illuminate the internal contradictions of “catalyzed commoning” as a heuristic concept for analyzing elite-driven development in other contexts.

Heping in decline: The preconditions for a catalyst

Heping Village is located in a historically underdeveloped region of Shandong Province. It is a single-surname village dominated by the Xu clan, yet unlike the tightly knit lineages of South China (Chu 2010; Freedman 1966), its kinship ties had been frayed by the political upheavals of the twentieth century. On paper, the village presented a robust profile: a registered population of roughly 1600 across 400 households cultivating 1800 mu ⁴ of land. By the late 2000s, however, the actual resident population had shrunk to barely 1000 (mostly the elderly, women and children) as the working-age population migrated to cities. Economically, the village was uniformly poor. A tiny fraction of emigrant businessmen, Secretary Xu among them, had amassed wealth elsewhere, but their capital remained disconnected from local agriculture. Among resident households in the early 2010s, most earned less than 10,000 yuan annually from fragmented grain plots, supplemented by irregular wage labor, which was barely enough to cover basic subsistence. There was no substantial intermediate stratum of wealthier peasants capable of financing the leap into modern agriculture on their own.

The village’s predicament stems from the dual legacy of its socialist past and reform-era transitions. During the collective era (1956–1978), Heping benefited uniquely from its proximity to the Cangshan State Farm. This large state-run enterprise provided vital off-farm wage employment, a scarce and stable source of cash income at the time. This external support functioned as a de facto common-pool opportunity, buffering the local economy and fostering a shared village identity. As an elderly villager recalled, “Back then, we were proud to say we were from Heping. People from other villages would say with envy, ‘Oh, the village next to the Cangshan State Farm!’”

Simultaneously, the de-collectivization reforms of the 1980s, while incentivizing individual effort, shattered the land. The implementation of the HRS in 1981 carved the landscape into a mosaic of tiny, disconnected plots to ensure egalitarian distribution of soil quality. In Heping, a typical household’s 4–5 mu allotment was scattered across as many as 20 distinct parcels. This extreme fragmentation, often referred to as “noodle-strip” land, rendered mechanization impossible and locked families into low-efficiency subsistence farming. The commune’s collapse also led to the decay of shared infrastructure like irrigation systems. This internal decay was compounded when the restructuring of the State Farm in the 1990s severed Heping’s external lifeline. Unlike other regions that successfully transitioned by leveraging their collective assets to develop lucrative Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) (Oi 1999; Walder 2009), Heping’s village committee was reportedly paralyzed by internal disagreements and a lack of entrepreneurial vision. It possessed neither the capital nor the cohesive capacity to forge a new development path. Trapped between a failing internal production system and the vanishing of external support, the village began a persistent slide into economic precarity.

The consequences of this dual predicament culminated in comprehensive social and economic erosion throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Meager returns from farming fueled a mass out-migration of working-age men, leaving behind a “hollowed-out” village of the elderly, women, and children. Villagers called this the “386,199 Army” (38 for women, 61 for children, 99 for the elderly), a wry shorthand for the gendered and generational hollowing out that depleted Heping’s human capital and deepened social atomization. The village collective fell into debt, rendering it incapable of providing essential public goods like road maintenance or organized garbage collection. As communal life dwindled, social problems like gambling reportedly became more prevalent, and cadre-resident relations deteriorated, strained by the enforcement of unpopular state policies. By the late 2000s, Heping was at its nadir: its agricultural system was broken, its collective institutions were hollowed out, and its social fabric was frayed by apathy and mistrust.

While Heping grappled with these internal dilemmas, the broader agricultural landscape of Lanling County was being reshaped by a lucrative “greenhouse revolution.” Starting in the 1980s, the region popularized the “Chinese greenhouse,” an earth-sheltered, solar-heated design enabling year-round production without fossil fuel heating (Chiras 2020). Propelled by aggressive government promotion (including low-interest loans and technical pilots) and the insatiable demand from urban centers like Shanghai, Lanling transformed into a key agricultural hub for North China. By the late 2000s, the county’s greenhouse area had surged to 20,000 hectares, creating a class of newly wealthy farmers in successful villages.

Yet Heping remained largely excluded from this transformation. The barrier was not a lack of ambition; in fact, a few pioneering households had attempted small-scale protected farming using simple plastic tunnels for early spring vegetables. The fundamental obstacle was a structural mismatch between the requirements of the new, capital-intensive greenhouse technology and the reality of the village’s land tenure. First, an efficient Chinese greenhouse requires a contiguous plot of at least 3–5 mu aligned east-west to maximize solar gain. Heping’s fragmented, north–south oriented plots physically precluded such construction. Second, the capital requirement had skyrocketed: by the late 2000s, a standard greenhouse cost between 80,000 and 100,000 yuan. For a villager earning a few thousand yuan annually from grain, this was an insurmountable threshold.

The root of the issue was that Heping lacked the organized capacity to overcome these individual-level constraints. Unlike some neighboring villages that benefited from stronger local leadership or retained collective assets, Heping’s village collective remained financially indebted and administratively feeble, a condition well documented in scholarship on rural China’s uneven developmental capacity (Oi 1999; Unger and Chan 2008). This institutional deficiency left Heping without the organizational means to overcome its structural disadvantages, trapping the village in a classic development trap: it needed to act collectively to solve its problems, but its problems had destroyed its ability to act collectively. This impasse set the stage for the necessity of an external catalyst, a role that the Changrong Cooperative and Secretary Xu would soon fill.

Catalyzing change: The practices and politics of commoning in Heping

Conclusion

This ethnography of Heping Village began with a puzzle: how does collective action emerge in a landscape fractured by social atomization and state dominance? The conceptual framework of “catalyzed commoning” developed here offers an answer that is both hopeful and cautionary. By acting as a “boundary spanner,” Secretary Xu successfully bridged the gap between the village’s fragmented resources and external market opportunities. He reorganized land, mobilized capital, and crafted a “model” identity, effectively pulling Heping out of its developmental impasse. In this sense, the catalyst worked.

Yet moving beyond a functionalist account reveals the profound ambivalence of this model. The “commons” constructed in Heping is not the egalitarian, self-governing community idealized in Ostromian theory. Instead, it is a form of “derived commoning,” namely, a managed system engineered from above rather than mobilized organically from below, sustained by the charismatic authority of a strongman leader. While delivering tangible benefits, these gains remain stratified: a “coalition of the capable” has thrived, while the elderly and resource-poor are largely marginalized, receiving welfare but denied meaningful agency. The village’s symbolic commons further cemented this hierarchy: the exemplary image that attracted state subsidies was produced and managed by the elite, with ordinary villagers positioned as supporting actors whose pragmatic complicity sustained the performance.

These findings compel us to rethink the changing nature of state power in contemporary China. Heping’s transformation reflects a shift from direct administrative control toward a more diffused exercise of infrastructural power (Mann 2008). By empowering boundary spanners like Xu, the state penetrates the granular level of village life not through coercion, but by embedding its developmental agenda within the logic of market-led prosperity. This constitutes a sophisticated form of indirect rule, where the state governs through the market via the entrepreneurial agency of local elites, effectively outsourcing the risks and labor of rural modernization while retaining political steering. The “visual management” of Heping’s reputation, its rendering of complex local realities into legible, state-friendly spectacles, exemplifies this mode of governance, revealing how the production of model villages serves not merely local development but the broader project of making state power visible and legitimate.

The conceptual implications of Heping’s case also inform broader debates on rural development across the Global South. From community-driven development projects in Africa to agricultural cooperatives in Latin America, policymakers increasingly look to local elites as “champions” of change. Heping serves as a critical mirror to these trends, revealing how elite-mediated development can rapidly mobilize resources yet produce outcomes that are as fragile as they are efficient. Rather than fostering genuine solidarity, such interventions often engineer a “simulacrum of community.” Consequently, the very mechanisms that catalyze rapid growth—the concentration of information, capital, and legitimacy within a single boundary spanner—sow the seeds of long-term instability.

Despite this inherent fragility, “catalyzed commoning” remains a potent, and perhaps necessary, mechanism for breaking the deadlock of underdevelopment in atomized communities. Yet without robust mechanisms for democratic oversight and broad-based inclusion, it risks converting the “commons” into a de facto private fiefdom. The enduring challenge for rural revitalization, both in China and beyond, lies not merely in identifying more capable catalysts, but in cultivating the institutional foundations that enable communities to govern themselves, with or without the strongman.