Pandemic State-Building: Chinese Administrative Expansion Since 2012

Abstract

In 2020, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, China embarked on one of the largest expansions of administrative capacity in its modern history. Compared to its pre-COVID self, the current Chinese government can now track and manage individual activity with unprecedented precision and regularity. While some of these developments were emergency measures that were limited to the pandemic, many of them have become institutionally entrenched through generalized lawmaking and policymaking, permanently transforming the Chinese government’s relationship with its population. 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 Article is the first systemic study of this paradigmatic transformation. Through a comprehensive analysis of central-level laws, regulations, and policies, paired with local case studies from major cities, it traces the institutional framework and political logic of Chinese administrative expansion. Its core argument is that the sudden onset of COVID-19 forced cohesive action onto a previously internally-conflicted political landscape. Chinese leaders had contemplated a significant expansion of urban local governance as early as 2012, when Xi Jinping first rose to power, but as recently as 2018-19, they still seemed torn about its potential to aggravate principal-agent problems within the Party-state. The arrival of the pandemic rapidly and definitively resolved this internal debate in favor of expansionism, producing the extraordinary informational and law-enforcement apparatus that now exists in close proximity to every urban resident.

Keywords: Administrative State, Local Governance, Covid-19, China, Urban Governments

JEL Classification: K23, K39, K49