Abstract: Under the backdrop of rural revitalization, endogenous social organizations are playing an increasingly prominent role in the modernization of rural governance. However, existing research exhibits a bias toward exogenous organizations while neglecting endogenous ones, and insufficiently explores the mechanisms of their embeddedness within local cultural contexts and their dynamic adaptive logic. Focusing on endogenous rural volunteer service organizations, this paper transcends the limitations of research paradigms that uncritically transplant urban experiences. It constructs a novel analytical framework of "composite reflexive governance" and employs an in-depth single-case study of a volunteer service team in Village B, supplemented by cross-regional auxiliary cases, to uncover the pathways through which endogenous organizations enhance rural governance efficacy. The findings reveal that, under the impact of urbanization, Village B is exposed to multiple risks, including institutional and cultural ones. Endogenous voluntary service organizations stimulate farmers' subjectivity, integrate internal and external resources, and achieve self-development and good governance of rural society through "multi-stage reflexivity" in modernization. The cases from eastern Guizhou and western Guangdong verify the robustness of this research. This study provides policy implications for the government to classify and strengthen the grassroots governance supplementary functions of endogenous social organizations. Furthermore, it challenges conventional interpretations in the "volunteer failure" and Western modernization theories that treat the state as an external variable, and re-positions the relationship between the state and endogenous social organizations in China’s governance modernization as one of "structural embeddedness and functional complementarity".

Key words: rural voluntary service, endogenous organization, reflexive modernization, governance modernization, rural local culture