Two Local Regime Types in China`s Rural Industrialization: A Comparative Study of Four Townships in Fujian and Jiangsu

Abstract

This paper describes two different types of local political regimes in four coastal Chinese townships during the process of rural industrialization in the 1980s and 1990s. The two types of local regimes represent at least two different evolutionary directions for the role of the local state bureaucracy in Chinese marketization era. These two local regime types stem from the differences in the property ownership type of rural industrial enterprises. These divergent types require different functions of their local government, which in turn entails different institutional arrangements of the state-society relationship. Recognizing different local regime types in today`s rural China helps us to analyze possible future changes in both the Communist regime and state and society in the PRC.