ABSTRACT
Having reached the end of this book, we would like to draw the reader’s attention again to the questions and observations that motivated us to conduct our research on a phenomenon that has so far been given little, perhaps too little, scholarly attention. In the introduction we suggested that there might be more to the reorganization of China’s urban neighbourhoods than meets the eye. We saw the examination of shequ reorganization – a truly momentous project – to be a good opportunity to view the adaptive capacity of the Chinese state at work, and we mused that the politics of shequ reorganization might even contribute to explaining why the Chinese one-Party state has not collapsed yet. We suggested that an analysis of shequ reconstruction might help us to gain a better understanding of the institutional changes not only in urban China, but also in rural China because we might have been asking the wrong questions there. For instance, by concentrating on village elections, we might have neglected the systematic study of village-level governance reforms, and might therefore have underestimated the capacity of the Chinese state to foresee or flexibly react to economic, social, or political crises.
