Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of urban neighborhood governance in China. Since the 2000s, China's development of a market economy and urbanization of the countryside have profoundly transformed the ways through which the Chinese party-state reaches, responds to, and interacts with its citizens. Overall, with the demise of the public sector's control of urban housing, different types of urban residential communities associated with the economic means of their residents have become the common scenario in Chinese urban life since the late 1990s. Chinese grassroots governance, in turn, has experienced unprecedented changes in institutional setting, personnel structure, work tasks, and governance dynamics. During this process, urban neighborhoods have gradually become the cornerstone for new state–society relations and the most influential and basic government unit. Focusing on new trends of neighborhood governance in urban China, this book introduces the thesis of hybrid authoritarianism to illustrate how and to what extent important social and political mechanisms play out through everyday politics and generate public support for the Chinese party-state at the grassroots level. It also explores what impacts these mechanisms have on Chinese political life in general.