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In a significant number of Chinese villages, officials rely on community institutions such as temple and lineage groups to fund and manage public services. This phenomenon is fairly widespread, as I discovered during six months of fieldwork in Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan and Zhejiang provinces between 1999 and 2001,'yet it has rarely been described or analysed. Preliminary results from a separate survey of 316 villages that I conducted in 2001 in Shanxi, Hebei, Jiangxi and Fujian indicated that lineage or religious organizations in 54 of these villages-that is, in 17 per cent of the villages-have organized public projects. Sixty-two villages reported that at least one public project in the past five years had not been organized by village officials. This paper will examine why certain villages have adopted this arrangement and others have not, and which factors village officials take into account when deciding whether to use …