Abstract: In the 1980s and 1990s, rural organizations created a lot of working methods to ensure the effective completion of all kinds of tasks, which undermined the legitimacy of grassroots authorities to a great extent. After entering the 21st century, the government carried out the democratization and legalization constructions in order to enhance the legitimacy of the grassroots authorities, but to a large extent it weakened the effectiveness of rural governance. Through establishing the dialectics notion of rural governance reform, reshaping the autonomy of rural governance and delimiting its legal and policy border, reshaping the dynamic mechanism of rural governance and formulating a strict regulatory system, the future rural governance reform is likely to achieve a balance between effectiveness and legitimacy.

Key words: rural governance; effectiveness; legality; grassroots authorities