出軌的改革：中國貧困縣農村信用合作社研究

Abstract

中國農村信用合作社屬於集體性質合作金融組織，以農業相關貸款為主要業務，前中國國務院總理朱鎔基在第九屆全國人大四次會議中強調「農信社是支持農村金融的主力軍」，農信社享有獨立法人資格並承擔推動農村金融發展責任，卻未履行應盡義務和金融功能，反而成為地方政府融通資金的「小金庫」。\n\n本研究試圖解釋農信社的發展與改革，從制度角度探討其與地方政府、地方企業之間的互動關係。農信社成立於一九五零年代，自毛統治時期即扮演地方政府小金庫角色，改革開放後，中國政府嚴格禁止地方政府干預金融機構經營，並給予補貼及稅收優惠提升其營運績效，但農信社受制於歷史制度影響，被既有路徑鎖住無法擺脫過去包袱，導致其發展與改革始終處在出軌的狀態。\n\n中國改革開放三十年，農信社歷經多次改革轉換依然被地方政府所掌控，本研究透過分析農信社內部黨系統成員名單與地方政企之間的重疊關係，觀察出地方政府如何躲避中央政策及法律限制，持續箝制農信社的發展與金融功能，試圖補充農信社相關文獻在此議題上的不足，並解釋農信社在地方—特別是以農業為主的貧困縣地區與地方政府和地方企業間的運作模式。

Chinese Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs) is a collective-owned and cooperative financial institution, and its major business is to provide loans for agriculture-based projects. “The RCCs is the main force of agrian finance,” as such claimed by the former Chinese Premier Zhu, Rongji in the fourth session of the ninth National People’s Congress regarding the function and status of RCCs. Nonetheless, despite the RCCs is a separate legal entity and aims at promoting the development of agrian finance, it fails to do its work but becomes a private coffer of local governments. This study investigates the trajectory of development and reforms of RCCs first, and then explores the process from an institutional perspective by addressing the dynamic interactions between the RCCs, the local governments and the local enterprises. RCCs was first established in the 1950s, and has served as a private coffer for local governments since then. After launching the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, the central government attempted to prohibit the local governments to intervene the operation of RCCs on the one hand, and provided fiscal subsidies as well as tax reliefs to RCCs on the other. Yet the operation of RCCs has been locked into the pre-existing institutional practices shaped in Mao’s era and been “out of track” regardless of various reform attemps by the central government. This study argues that the organizational overlap between the branches of Chinese Communism Party in the local governments and RCCs largely explains why local governments could survive those reform attemps and persistentally gained the control of RCCs in the past 30 years. By examining the name lists of the party branches in the local governments and RCCs, I demonstrate that the local governments transferred the control of RCCs from administrative system to party system, thus they successfully circumvented the constrains of administrative policies and rules in various reform attemps by the central government. The finding also helps to explore the dynamic patterns of interaction among the local governments, RCCs, and local enterprises in those areas of agriculture-based economy, thus contributes to fill this gap in the literature of state-business research in China studies.