The scheme has two loops built into every cycle and no loop that asks whether the scheme itself works. Inside the village, elected oversight and finance groups inspect finished projects before the balance is released, and an appraisal step requires most villagers to rate the result (90 percent satisfaction returns before reimbursement, per Chen Yiyuan) with projects rectified when they miss (Wang). Above the village, township and county governments review, hold the accounts and audit, and the party discipline inspection commission has issued more and more rules on fund use (He and Gui). These upper loops did change the rules: the per-village floor rose from 200,000 yuan in 2009 to 400,000 in 2013 (Chen Yiyuan); questionnaires moved from open to closed options as proposals became routine (Zhuang); the three-step cycle became a codified six-step method; projects above 100,000 yuan were made to go to third-party tender; signatures per claim went from 10 to 8; from 2017 environmental sanitation became an assessed priority; urban communities were added from late 2013 (Zhuang) and Pengzhou's deliberation system spread after 2013 (Frenkiel); and by 2022 the funds had been renamed community development and governance funds with tighter use rules (He and Gui). None of those changes is traced by any source to an evaluation of participation or outcomes; they came from administrative control. The research record is external and informational: the HuiZhi Participation Center's 30,000-plus project records (Zhuang 2014), field studies by Wang (2012), Frenkiel (2016 to 2018), Chen Yiyuan (2018) and He and Gui, and the 2021 randomised experiment, which recommends scaling up but had no mandate to change the village rules. The primary regulation was not available, so the internal loops are known from researchers' descriptions.