‘Carrot and stick’ approach to housing demolition and relocation under flexible authoritarianism in urban China

Abstract

In the context of the reconfigured state-society relation, Chinese states’ modes of crisis management have profoundly transformed, featuring the state’s greater efforts in reconciling the conflicts among the state machinery of capital accumulation, political stability maintenance and the increasingly diversified societal needs. However, how the local state performs specific missions accordingly in handling day-to-day conflicts on the ground remains under-examined. Accounting for the mundane yet nontrivial conflict resolving strategies featuring ‘carrot and stick’ approach, this article aims to fill this gap by examining the underlying logic, the operational mechanism, and the socioeconomic implications of flexible authoritarianism at the local level, based on an empirical investigation on how local state handles nail households in housing demolition and relocation in Dalian, China. We define ‘carrot and stick’ approach as a manifestation of flexible authoritarianism on the ground, which employs a variety of formal and informal strategies as well as administrative and market instruments to handle nail households-induced conflicts that are constitutive of the renewed state-society relation. This study reveals that the ‘carrot and stick’ approach under flexible authoritarianism has been rationalized as an efficient way for the local state to maintain political and social stability whilst sustaining the momentum of economic growth, thus widely employed in China. This research deepens our theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamic state-society relation and flexible authoritarianism, and offers a detailed interpretation of why and how such hybrid and flexible ‘carrot and stick’ approach is rendered inevitable under the current politico-economic environment, power structure, legal and institutional configuration in urban China.