Governing by Proxy: How Indigenous Villages Make the Local State in Chinese Urbanization

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: The Politics of Authoritarianism 2

Abstract

Urbanization challenges the territorial authority of late-urbanizing authoritarian regimes, when explosive growth of urban populations outstrips their state capacities. Consequently, these regimes often fall into what I call “the urban governance trap”, where regaining territorial control demands the very capacities whose absence caused its loss—the crux is to affordably enmesh migrants, the new urban poor, into state apparatuses, something few late-urbanizing regimes achieve sustainably. China presents a puzzle: despite its pell-mell urbanization and uneven local state capacities, it managed to retain control while gradually expanding urban administrative apparatuses. How did Chinese cities overcome the urban governance trap? Through multi-sited ethnography in Shenzhen, the “least likely” case to succeed in China, I identified indigenous villages as a governing proxy for the municipal state that helped the latter overcome the trap. Intersecting formal and informal institutions, governing by proxy allows the municipal state to delegate governance to indigenous villages through nonintervention while simultaneously strengthening its own capacities by leveraging villages' administrative resources. Once it solidified its new capacities, the municipal state affordably subordinated unruly villages to reestablish territorial authority. I contribute to urban sociology, political sociology, and development sociology by contextualizing mechanisms of authoritarian governance and state transformation in late urbanization.

Author

• Yunhan Wen, Princeton University