As financing platforms and construction agents for local governments, urban investment and development companies (chengshi touzi fazhan gongsi (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)), or UIDCs, play a crucial role in China's urbanization and local governance. Existing research has often treated UIDCs as static instruments of local governments while overlooking their evolving, and at times conficting, objectives and their complex governance roles within local administrations. Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork within a district government and its affiliated UIDCs, this article examines UIDCs within the broader dynamics of state capitalism and central-local relations. First, it argues that despite marketization reforms promoting corporate governance and substantive business operations, UIDCs remain deeply embedded in local governance structures, particularly in less developed regions, where they continue to serve as key vehicles for local governments' developmental and fiscal objectives. Second, rather than clarifying the boundary between the state and the market as officially intended, marketization has further intensified tensions between the two. To navigate both the central government's reform agenda and local political imperatives, UIDCs often adopt adaptive strategies to reconcile multiple and conficting pressures. These practices offer short-term remedies, while also introducing unintended financial and governance risks. By examining the paradoxical outcomes of UIDCs' marketization at the local level, this article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how state and market interact amid central-local tensions in contemporary China.
This article challenges the prevailing view that China's electric vehicle (EV) boom is primarily the result of top-down industrial policy. Drawing on the history of China's automotive sector since the 1990s, it shows that stringent central regulations and entrenched state-owned enterprises (SOEs) excluded most localities from lucrative joint ventures. In response, local governments forged strategic alliances with private manufacturers, leveraging capital markets, policy loopholes, and post-2008 credit expansion to attract investment, upgrade industries, and diversify regional economies. These partnerships, initially in traditional automotive manufacturing, proved pivotal to China's EV takeoff after 2015, enabling private firms to outcompete SOEs in innovation, responsiveness, and market expansion. Comparative cases in steel and pharmaceuticals illustrate the broader applicability of this dynamic. The study highlights the enduring adaptability of Chinese local governments and private capital in navigating central constraints, offering new insights into industrial policies, industrial upgrading, and local developmental states.
During the past decade, China's leaders have asserted more centralized control over the country's vast bureaucracy through stricter discipline and accountability mechanisms, expanded administrative regulations, stringent reporting requirements, and elaborate performance evaluations. Local government leaders, particularly at the county and township levels, have, for the purposes of self-preservation, responded to the increased pressures with a variety of countermeasures, collectively known in the Chinese-language policy literature as "formalism." The term "formalism" refers to shirking, feigned compliance and falsification, and a long list of bureaucratic behavior that emphasizes form over substance (zhongxingshi qingshizhi (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)) and process over outcome (zhongquocheng qingjieguo (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)). Party leaders see formalism as a serious threat to the Communist Party's policy agenda, and combating it has become a top priority. This article draws on extensive recent field research across six provinces to examine the prevalence and drivers of formalism. We argue that the national state's efforts to combat formalism and strengthen accountability are not only failing but exacerbating the problem. Our findings have critical implications for policy implementation and public management in the PRC.
This article traces the lasting transformations in China's urban grassroots governance system wrought by three years of zero-COVID policy: increased information gathering and surveillance activities conducted by Residents' Committees (RCs), as well as their integration into the hierarchical bureaucratic system. To demonstrate these transformations, we employ a Foucauldian lens to distinguish between emergency policies introduced during the pandemic that govern public health, which we term "biosecurity," and longer-term policies whose object of governance is public order, which we term "political security." Using in-depth fieldwork data alongside analysis of relevant legislation, we show that the winding down of biosecurity measures in early 2023 have laid bare an enhanced political security framework, which now forms essential parts of RCs' daily governing tool kit. We situate these political security measures within two broader changes to China's post-COVID administrative structure: the delegation of governance tasks from RCs to grid workers, cementing RCs within the administrative hierarchy; and the creation of the Society Work Department of the CCP Central Committee, placing focus on regular home visits and conflict prevention. We conclude that a major legacy of pandemic governance in China is a more powerful system of grassroots bureaucracy capable of the microgovernance of citizens' private lives.
The authoritarian regime in China wields two distinct powers. On the one hand, the central government, the Communist Party, and the National People's Congress exercise ruling power to formulate policies, enact laws, and issue orders that are binding throughout the country. On the other hand, local governments, the civil service, and the police exercise administrative power to implement policies, enforce laws, and execute orders with considerable discretion. People render support to the regime based on assessments of the trustworthiness of the two sets of power-exercising institutions. For most people, their two assessments converge into three patterns of largely coherent judgments, namely, full support, ambivalence, and full disapproval. However, about a quarter of the population indicate only partial support; they trust the ruling power but distrust administrative power. Existing studies overlook the structural features of regime support in the People's Republic of China and overestimate its strength by conflating some respondents' trust in ruling power with full regime support. This study proposes a typology-based measurement that captures the structural features and assesses the strength of regime support more accurately.
China's rapid expansion of higher education in recent decades has produced an unprecedented number of college graduates. This expansion has outpaced the development of the high-skilled labor market, resulting in elevated levels of unemployment and underemployment among young graduates. While these trends are often viewed as potential sources of political instability, little empirical research has explored the actual political consequences. This article addresses this by combining city-level data on youth employment and protest frequencies with in-depth interviews of unemployed and underemployed college graduates. Contrary to conventional expectations, we find that employment precarity among the graduates does not lead to increased protest activity. Interview-based research explains this political quiescence and highlights a confluence of institutional constraints, economic pressures, and social-psychological strains that inhibit mobilization. Rather than voicing their grievances collectively, many graduates respond to employment precarity through passive withdrawal and individualized coping strategies. What emerges is a generation of educated youth who are not politically disengaged out of apathy but are muted by a system that renders protest prohibitively costly and conformity essential for economic survival.
