Negotiated Autonomy: How Rural Elites Reconstruct Village Autonomy Through the Project System

The transformation of rural governance in China under the project system presents a paradox: while state-led projects intensify administrative penetration, new forms of local autonomy continue to emerge. This study examines how rural elites—returnees with urban experience—mediate between bureaucratic control and community agency to reconstruct village autonomy in project-based rural revitalization. Based on a qualitative single-case study of L Village in Shanxi Province, drawing on semi-structured interviews and project documents, the findings reveal that village autonomy in L Village has evolved into a negotiated form through three interlinked mechanisms: resource translation, institutional bricolage, and symbolic legitimation. Rural elites act as embedded intermediaries who reinterpret bureaucratic procedures in locally meaningful ways, reassemble formal and informal rules to create flexibility, and deploy moral-cultural narratives to legitimise authority. These processes transform external control into adaptive governance capacity, producing a hybrid condition of negotiated autonomy—a relational mode of village autonomy that coexists with state control. The study contributes to debates on rural governance and state–society relations by extending Evans' notion of embedded autonomy to the micro-village level. It argues that the project system relocates village autonomy to bureaucratic–local interfaces, where negotiation becomes the defining feature of grassroots governance in contemporary rural China.