Party Corporatism in Urban China: Grid Governance and Resurgent Centralism

Using grid governance as an illustrative case, this article aims to understand how the current recentralisation process has been implemented in the grassroots community in urban China. We find that while grid governance is an innovative approach to community governance, it has in fact become a way to implement political and administrative recentralisation. We point out that grid governance is reflective of party corporatism—it resembles a specifically established association to unite various social forces to participate in community governance. However, the weight of the decision-making power over the operation of the association lies heavily on the CCP. The article further discusses that such mode of community governance is rendered inevitable in the context of a resurgent centralism and has reconfigured the bureaucratic system and state-society relation in urban China.