Power Leveraging: The Everyday Expansion of the Grassroots State in Urban China

ABSTRACT China has witnessed a notable expansion of state power during and after the pandemic, particularly at the grassroots level. How has this occurred? The Shequ, a grassroots state agent, has played a central role, taking on extensive administrative responsibilities aimed at enhancing social management, often at the expense of rule‐of‐law constraints. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how the Shequ mobilizes resources within its community to expand its de facto administrative authority. This process is theorized as power leveraging: how minor, often unnoticed acts of coordination, once institutionalized, produce significant shifts in administrative power. It offers an alternative explanation for China's administrative expansion, one set in motion not by authorization but by the apportionment of tasks to a body without the means to discharge them. Theoretically, the paper relocates administrative power from the authority a body is granted to the means it assembles, and shows why such an expansion escapes the mechanisms designed to check it: it runs through functions the Shequ is entitled to perform and is financed from resources the state never records. Beyond the Chinese case, power leveraging offers a lens for how state power expands wherever mandates outrun the resources and oversight to match them.