Revisiting Urban Regime Theory in the Context of Contemporary China

Urban regime theory explains governing capacity through coalitions that mobilize resources beyond municipal authority, but it undertheorizes how such coalitions operate in vertically integrated party-states. Through a problem-driven critical synthesis, this article develops a China-centered framework organized around a recursive causal process. A structuring field combines mandates and accountability, inherited local resource ecologies, and territorial positioning. Effective bounded local autonomy and prior infrastructural capacity define action conditions. Mandate interpretation, resource bundling, actor incorporation, and institutional embedding convert these conditions into regime configurations of agendas, coalitions, resource commitments, and schemes of cooperation. Governance reorientation is identified as a durable agenda shift accompanied by consequential change in at least two other configuration elements. A reconstruction of reform-era Chinese cities illustrates how a stable party-state backbone coexisted with changes in resource bases, coalition cores, cooperation rules, risk hierarchies, and temporal horizons. The framework re-embeds urban regime theory in multi-level centralized urban governance and generates scope-bounded propositions for comparative research.