Here’s a new working paper that I co-authored with Yutian An (Princeton University Ph.D. Candidate and Yale Law grad) on Chinese governmental expansion during Covid, titled “The Covid State: Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era.” papers.ssrn.com
It argues that the Chinese Party-state used Covid as an impetus to push through a permanent, rather than merely emergency expansion of local governance capacity—arguably the largest in PRC history, certainly the largest in the post-Mao era.
Such an expansion had been contemplated, but not fully committed to, between 2012 and 2019, but Covid provided a decisive political push to get central Party leadership to commit full-bore. The unprecedented local tracking and enforcement powers you now see are the outcome.
For whatever reason (probably something to do with the difficulty of getting into China, and the political environment inside China), there hasn’t been any serious academic writing about this institutional transformation, but it’s incredibly significant nonetheless.
Most importantly, the Party-state delegated enormous administrative law enforcement and information collection powers to two levels of urban government—the “subdistrict,” and below it, the “neighborhood community”—that used to be institutionally marginalized. This allowed it to…
… bring administrative management and control right to the doorstep of every urban household. It’s hard to overstate how big a change this is in terms of urban everyday life. You really feel the state in close proximity nowadays, whereas previously it was much more distant.
Anyway, we’re hoping that this article is the start of a serious academic conversation on this paradigm shift (I don’t use that word lightly, and I really do think this is a paradigm shift in terms of the capacities of the Chinese administrative state). Comments welcome.
(Also rather interesting how views of this tweet and the paper jump right after the Super Bowl ends…)
Loading suggestions...