Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China examines the key mechanisms operating at the grassroots level in China that contribute to urban development and increased public support for the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese state. Beibei Tang uncovers new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance since the 2000s to reveal the significant factors that contribute to regime survival. Tang introduces the concept of hybrid authoritarianism, a governance mechanism an authoritarian state employs to produce governance legitimacy, public support, and regime sustainability. Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space between state and society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and in this context, ultimately strengthens CCP leadership. Tang documents processes of hybrid authoritarianism through her focus on various types of urban neighborhoods, including new urban middle-class neighborhoods, and the increasing urbanization of the countryside. Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China provides a conceptual framework that avoids scholarly approaches that tend to reify either one-party autocracy or Western-centric notions of democracy.

Chinese residential communities are places of intense governing and an arena of active political engagement between state and society. In The Government Next Door, Luigi Tomba investigates how the goals of a government consolidated in a distant authority materialize in citizens' everyday lives. Chinese neighborhoods reveal much about the changing nature of governing practices in the country. Government action is driven by the need to preserve social and political stability, but such priorities must adapt to the progressive privatization of urban residential space and an increasingly complex set of societal forces. Tomba’s vivid ethnographic accounts of neighborhood life and politics in Beijing, Shenyang, and Chengdu depict how such local "translation" of government priorities takes place. Tomba reveals how different clusters of residential space are governed more or less intensely depending on the residents’ social status; how disgruntled communities with high unemployment are still managed with the pastoral strategies typical of the socialist tradition, while high-income neighbors are allowed greater autonomy in exchange for a greater concern for social order. Conflicts are contained by the gated structures of the neighborhoods to prevent systemic challenges to the government, and middle-class lifestyles have become exemplars of a new, responsible form of citizenship. At times of conflict and in daily interactions, the penetration of the state discourse about social stability becomes clear.

Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China examines the key mechanisms operating at the grassroots level in China that contribute to urban development and increased public support for the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese state. Beibei Tang uncovers new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance since the 2000s to reveal the significant factors that contribute to regime survival. Tang introduces the concept of hybrid authoritarianism, a governance mechanism an authoritarian state employs to produce governance legitimacy, public support, and regime sustainability. Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space between state and society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and in this context, ultimately strengthens CCP leadership. Tang documents processes of hybrid authoritarianism through her focus on various types of urban neighborhoods, including new urban middle-class neighborhoods, and the increasing urbanization of the countryside. Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China provides a conceptual framework that avoids scholarly approaches that tend to reify either one-party autocracy or Western-centric notions of democracy.

China’s unprecedented urbanization is underpinned by not only massive rural-urban migration but also a household registration system embedded in a territorial hierarchy that produces lingering urban-rural duality. The mid-1990s onwards witnessed increasing reliance on land revenues by municipal governments, causing repeated redrawing of city boundaries to incorporate surrounding countryside. The identification of real estate as a growth anchor further fueled urban expansion. Sprawling commodity housing estates proliferate on urban-rural fringes, juxtaposed with historical villages undergoing intense densification. The traditional urban core and work-unit compounds also undergo wholesale redevelopment. Alongside large influx of migrants, major reshuffling of population has taken place inside metropolitan areas. Chinese cities today are more differentiated than ever, with new communities superimposing and superseding older ones. The rise of the urban middle class, in particular, has facilitated the formation of homeowners’ associations, and poses major challenges to hitherto state dominated local governance. The present volume tries to more deeply unravel and delineate the intertwining forms and processes outlined above from a variety of angles: circulatory, mobility and precariousness; urbanization, diversity and segregation; and community and local governance. Contributors include scholars of Chinese cities from mainland China, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and the United States. This volume was previously published as a special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics.

Currently there are more than 125 Chinese cities with a population exceeding one million. The unprecedented urban growth in China presents a crucial development for studies on globalization and urban transformation. This concise and engaging book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese urbanization, by investigating five key themes - governance, migration, landscape, inequality, and cultural economy. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and original research materials, Ren offers a critical account of the Chinese urban condition after the first decade of the twenty-first century. She argues that the urban-rural dichotomy that was artificially constructed under socialism is no longer a meaningful lens for analyses and that Chinese cities have become strategic sites for reassembling citizenship rights for both urban residents and rural migrants. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of urban and development studies with a focus on China, and all interested in understanding the relationship between state, capitalism, and urbanization in the global context.

Demonstrating the crucial importance of local governance in China’s development and international relations, this topical Handbook combines theoretical approaches with novel methodological tools to understand state–society relations at the local level.

Cities in China are extremely dynamic and experience high pressure to grow, transform and adapt. But in what directions, on what basis and to which goals? The authors and their team have researched the intensive transformation processes of about twenty-five neighborhood communities that were created in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Suzhou in the last 30 years, ranging from inner-city to peripheral areas, starting from planning and leading up to user satisfaction studies. This in-depth overview on neighborhood typology and development in China follows the book Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities by Peter Rowe, who is among the world’s best scholars on urban transformation in East Asia, together with his colleagues Ann Forsyth and Har Ye Kan.