Village norms generally denote what behaviors are regarded as normal in a specific village. In general, all members of the village participate in the process of setting these norms. With a long history in China, village norms have played an important role in traditional rural governance. In 2019, the General Offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council published “A Guideline for Enhancing and Improving Rural Governance”, affirming that village norms are still applicable to and very useful for rural governance nowadays. In the subsequent fad of revising village norms, many so-called new norms have neither demonstrated much continuity from cultural heritage specific to villages, nor shown proper adaptation to current challenges and opportunities faced by villages. It is, therefore, not surprising that such a formality has led to a common problem: villagers do not know why they have new norms, and village leadership do not know how to use them.

This case is derived from Yunyin Village of Xinxing Town of Yunfu City in Guangdong Province. The making of its new norms was contributed by some researchers from Sen Yat-sen University’s Institute of China Regional Development Coordination and Village Building. The researchers facilitated villagers’ deliberative participation in the process of setting norms regarding issues closely related to their daily interests (e.g., garbage classification, sewage disposal, and parking management). Researchers raised three particular guiding questions in the process: (1) What are the things we did that have brought some problems in Yunyin? (2) What shall we do to make Yunyin a better place? (3) What can we all agree to do so that Yunyin can become that better place?

Noteworthy is that villagers engaged very actively in the whole process of making their new village norms. After many open discussions and debates, they reached a consensus on their new norms (i.e., “Yunyin Village Norms”), a document signed by all representatives of villagers.

This case offers two lessons about how to make village norms effectively. First, connections should be built between village norms and villagers’ interests. Otherwise, norm-making would simply be an assigned task, for which villagers would lose enthusiasm in the long term. Second, democratic participation in the norm-making process should be practiced. This would lead to village norms that are more pertinent to villagers’ interests and more likely to obtain buy-in from villagers. Making village norms effectively can improve social cohesion of a village. More importantly, it can develop villagers’ competence in self-governance and even motivate more villagers to participate in the governance of their community.