Authoritarian governance and rural urbanisation in China

The world has witnessed the concurrent rise of autocracies and urbanisation during the past decades. How do authoritarian regimes manage the transformation of rural societies, which are often lineage-based and self-governed under informal and customary rules? This study examines the question of contemporary village governance in socialist China. It reveals how the party-state has leveraged on the rural grassroots organisations and traditional village institutions to reward allegiance, cultivate loyalty, repress latent resistance and maintain political order in the urbanising villages. Focusing on the capital city of Beijing as a case study, this research reveals its differentiation strategy in managing the development of rural communities with different internal solidarity and political allegiance. This research clarifies how authoritarianism can accommodate self-governing rural communities, despite leading to a diversity of state-village relationships at the grassroots.