Innovating Authoritarian Grassroots Control: The Grid Management System in China

• In Event: China’s Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the New Era

Abstract

Maintaining effective control over the society has been a constant challenge toward autocracies. This is especially so in the case of reform-era China given the drastically transformation in state-society relations, with the state retreating from the grassroots and the society becoming less dependent on the state and significantly empowered in many different ways. How does the Chinese Party-state maintain and even strengthen its rule over the increasingly restive society? This paper addresses this question by examining the grid management system as an institutional innovation in China’s grassroots governance. Rooted in the "Fengqiao Experience" in the Maoist era, contemporary grid management has not only been pushed nationwide, but also become more effective and efficient by integrating advanced information technologies. Based on systematic analysis of a large collection of local official propaganda articles and news reports, we map the organization, function, and regional variation of the grid management system. More specifically, we find that the Party-state adjusts the grid management to fit local conditions. On the one hand, urbanization has helped the regime enhance the efficiency of grassroots control and governance, allowing it to remarkably reduce the deployment of full-time grid managers. This is likely because in more urbanized areas, the population is relatively concentrated and the technological infrastructure can more readily support effective monitoring and surveillance. On the other hand, in troubling localities, especially minority regions, where there are higher stability maintenance pressure, the state has scaled up the grid system by instituting more grid layers, deploying more full-time grid managers, mobilizing more part-time grid managers, and getting grassroots cadres more involved. The findings confirm the adaptability, flexibility, and elasticity of the Chinese Party-state in grassroots governance. The fact that modern information technologies are integrated into the grid management system to enhance authoritarian rule runs against the modernization theory and the digital empowerment argument, thus contribute to the burgeoning authoritarian resilience literature

Authors

• Yuge Wang, University of Georgia

• Rongbin Han, University of Georgia