In rural China, village-level governance is usually grounded in three types of political authority. Traditional authority often comes from powerful clans; Legal authority is mostly founded on formal political institutions; and charismatic authority, which without doubt, customarily stems from personal charisma. These types of authority, this paper argues, have a lot to do with a village's potentials to achieve economic development. Almost all fast-growing village economies have capable CCP party secretaries who bring together fellow villagers for industrial production and collective welfare. On the other hand, once a party secretary goes through a ”legitimacy crisis,” the economic growth of the village will soon be stunted. In other occasions, the despotic rule of party secretaries may also generate discontent and frustration. Even in those cases, without certain changes in political authority-such as a new leadership or the anti-regime elite, a real revolution will still be out of the question.