The unit is the administrative village, a population of roughly 1,000 to 5,000 (Zhuang), across a municipality of 12,390 square kilometres with 20 districts, county-level cities and counties, 317 townships and sub-districts and 3,432 villages and communities (Zhuang; Frenkiel). Counts of covered villages differ with the year and with what is counted: over 2,300 villages in the first three cycles (Zhuang; Frenkiel), 2,048 villages plus 701 rural communities with councils in 2010 (Jiang and Huang), more than 2,700 villages and communities by 2013 (Zhuang), over 2,600 rural villages and localities plus 1,400 urban sub-districts and neighbourhoods by 2018 (Cabannes). Each village has its own pot and its own council and does not cross its boundary; villagers' representatives are elected by village sub-group, so bargaining inside the council runs between sub-groups over whose road or channel is funded (Zhuang). Every village gets the same floor with the amount adjusted for population and, by the vice-mayor's account, land area; the spatial equity is at the city level, since the whole scheme channels money to rural areas to close the urban-rural gap, which Cabannes 2018 calls a reversal of spatial priorities. Urban communities were brought in from the end of 2013 under quite different modalities that no source in this room describes. The 2021 experiment paired urban and rural communities on observable characteristics and randomised timing within pairs.