ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I analysed localism as a manifestation of the ritual economy. In this chapter I explore the institutional structure of the Chinese state in more detail. The central argument is that we can only adequately understand the Chinese reforms and their outcome as a reflection of the state-building effort that was launched in the late nineteenth century. In this process, a concept peculiar to Chinese studies looms large: the ‘local state’. In the longue durée, we approach the local state as a contemporary institutional legacy of the traditional structures of empire. The term ‘local state’ has been introduced in the context of contemporary Chinese studies in order to grasp the peculiar dynamics between central government and ‘local government’.1 It has been rarely used with reference to Imperial China, as I did in Chapter 2. However, if we distinguish between the Chinese and the Western uses of the term ‘local government’ and compare this with the term ‘local state’, the historical continuity that lurks behind the many family resemblances across historical watersheds is evident, since the term ‘local state’ mainly refers to the level of the county, and thus relates to the urban vs. rural borderline that is constitutive for the institutional structure of the modern Chinese state. In comparison, the Chinese term ‘local government’, ‘difang zhengfu’ (地方政府), covers all levels of government that are not assigned to the central level, thus including even the provinces. Comparing this use with the Imperial situation, we recognize that in fact the relationship between higher level ‘local governments’ and the central level bears many resemblances, but there are also important differences. As we have seen, in Imperial times the Imperial administration exerted tight control on the entire bureaucratic system down to the county level, but left the level below to culturalistic governance via intermediary local elites. This constitutional dualism also partly applies to contemporary China, which highlights the continuing role of the county level
in separating two distinct types of sociopolitical systems. Yet, the fundamental difference between contemporary and Imperial China is the increasing bureaucratic penetration of local society by governmental institutions emanating from the county level. This is why we talk about a ‘local state’, which did not exist in Imperial times yet continues to bear the mark of Imperial times. On the one hand, the county level remains a special institutional structure in the entire governmental set-up, but at the same time it is the engine of the formalization of grassroots-level government. In this sense, the local state stays at the centre of the evolution of Chinese governmentality in the course of modernization. Yet, a parallel process is that, in modern China, the provinces emerged as a distinct level of Chinese politics, so that the direct lines of bureaucratic control have been blurred by the dynamics of political bargaining and representation of regional interests. Indeed, for many macro-level phenomena of Chinese economic growth, the level of provinces is crucial to understanding their specific dynamics, such as being driven by structural and institutional differences across provinces. However, as I will argue, this role of the provinces unfolds as a manifestation of certain organizational structures in the central state, thus also remaining tightly constrained by these structures. Therefore, the Chinese meaning of ‘local government’ blurs a very significant distinction between the structural dynamics on the level of the provinces and the level of the county. The former is a central state phenomenon, the latter a local state phenomenon.2
