What Are the Village-Based Work Teams Doing?—Based on a Field Investigation of an Impoverished County in the Central Mountainous Region of China

In order to comprehensively promote rural revitalization and consolidate and expand the achievements of poverty alleviation, the state provides cadre resources to the rural areas in the form of dispatching work teams that form a normalized working mechanism for grassroots social governance. This investigation finds that the work of the village work teams is complicated, with a dual responsiveness to the bureaucratic administrative system at all levels and to social governance in the village. The work mechanism can be roughly summarized as: completing the prescribed tasks, coping with the various assessments, and responding to the internal affairs of the village. Objectively, in the actual operational process, to a certain extent the mechanism creates multiple dilemmas at the grassroots levels, including formalism, disruption of governance order, an imbalance in the fair allocation of public governance resources, an overburdening of grassroots personnel, and increased pressures for funding of village operations. The essence of the dilemma is that against the background of the policy transition from targeted poverty alleviation to rural revitalization, the grassroots still follows a traditional path of poverty management and faces inertia in terms of assessing governance, leading to negative external effects and affecting the adaptability at the grassroots levels. It is necessary to consider the actual capacity of the system for the work teams from the perspective of the grassroots subjects, to adjust the measures to local conditions and allow them to change with the times, and not to settle in the villages merely for the sake of settling in the villages.