Blurring the Boundaries of Governance: China’s Work Teams in Comparative Perspective

A notable feature of Chinese Communist rule, from revolutionary days on, has been the blurred boundaries of its governance mechanisms. The lines separating formal from informal, legal from illegal, and state from societal have – at least until quite recently – proven exceptionally permeable. This paper focuses on an especially fluid and flexible means of Chinese Communist governance: the deployment of mobile task forces, or “work teams,” for both routine and crisis policy implementation. Directed by higher-levels of the party-state to advance a specific mission at the grassroots, work teams mobilize society in a manner that reflects the continuing influence of China’s revolutionary experience. The paper assesses the contributions and costs of this “campaign-style” of governance in comparison to the practices of other Communist and non-Communist systems, past and present.