The cycle as Zhuang 2014 describes it has three steps that some districts stretch to six or eight: a questionnaire to every household, collected by the village committee with council members (later with a 90 percent signature requirement, Chen Yiyuan); sorting and screening by the council, which merges similar proposals and strikes out ineligible ones such as sharing the money in cash; debate and vote in the elected village council, sometimes with priority scoring, choosing the contractor too; technical review and ratification by the township government; public notice on boards, posters and banners; monitoring by a finance management group and a 5 to 7 member oversight group, who evaluate the finished work before the balance is paid (in one village the approval stamp was cut into five pieces); and a final appraisal step where villagers rate the result and projects are rectified, which Chen Yiyuan reports as the sixth step of a codified six-step method. Reimbursement runs through township-held village accounts and needed 8 to 10 signatures by 2018. Council members are unpaid and elected for three years (Frenkiel; Chen Hongtai), so the council's work is counted as volunteer labour. Villages can commit their annual fund to a loan of up to seven times its value from the city investment company (Zhuang, Wang, Cabannes 2018). Rule-writing belongs to the municipal party committee and government, with later tightening by finance and discipline bodies; the project database was built by the HuiZhi Participation Center; the online platform belongs to the 2021 community experiment, not the village scheme. Mandate defense is thin: the vice-mayor hoped to legislate the reforms and Pengzhou wrote its deliberation system into local rules (Frenkiel). The step list is reconstructed from researchers' descriptions; the primary regulation was not available.