The community development association is the basic unit of community development work. For the past three decades, the fundamental social policies of community development have been to promote welfare at the grassroots level, to enhance the quality of life of the local residents, and to improve local public infrastructure. However, the geographic territory of these community development associations often overlaps with that of the village, the basic unit of the administrative district. The conflicts that arise in resource allocation and power struggles between the community development associations and villages are commonplace in local politics. It is thus no surprise that the community development association, as a grassroots social network, inevitably takes on a political role. Little effort has been put into the study of community development associations from a political science point of view, while there has been a tremendous amount of research on community development associations by scholars of social work. As a pioneering study, this paper seeks to explore the role of the community development association in local politics and to investigate the interactions between the community development associations and local factions. The result of this study indicates that there are four different patterns of interaction between the community development associations and villages, and that, in the current ecology of local politics, local politicians have strong incentives to intervene in the operations of the community development associations.