local and regional governance in china

This entry discusses local and regional governance in China. It observes that Chinese local and regional governance involves the organization of administrative territories in what can be best described as a Russian doll-style nested hierarchy of local states, while the term “region” has become merely a policy and/or planning notion since the economic reform in the late 1970s. The very structured administrative hierarchy is argued to be the fundamental element to understanding Chinese local and regional governance. The oscillation at different times between regionalism and localism in the international policy and academic debate did not prevail on its own in China either before or after economic reform. Even the original international meaning of the notion of governance is hardly applicable. The discourse of centralization and decentralization are not associated with moves between regionalism and localism but are better explained in terms of a shift from central state-led to local state-led developmentalism.