State-established grassroots organizations in modern China possess deep historical roots, yet the processes of state-building during the late Qing and Republican periods fundamentally reshaped their development. While the administrative reach of the late Qing bureaucracy extended only to the county level, the introduction of a local self-government system enabled the creation of administrative subdivisions down to the village level. These changes relied on community participation and served to expand the state’s structural presence. Notably, beginning in 1928, the Kuomintang (KMT) sought to reconstruct the state structure through bottom-up “popular governance” (民治), grounded in universal suffrage, as a strategy to secure political legitimacy.
However, the envisioned state-building through local self-government largely failed to materialize as intended. The local self-government system of the late Qing and early Republican periods functioned primarily as an instrument of bureaucratic control, and the KMT’s early initiatives struggled to gain enduring support from grassroots society. In particular, the revival of the Baojia system as a means of grassroots control demonstrated the persistence of centralized bureaucratic strategies, yet it too failed to establish widespread legitimacy.
The Republican regimes’ state-building efforts were constrained by both internal fragmentation and external pressures, with political instability impeding the effective implementation of central policies at the grassroots level. After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) undertook grassroots organization under more stable political conditions, transitioning from a predominantly rural-based strategy to an urban governance model that drew on structures inherited from the KMT. This approach exhibited continuities in bureaucratic control while simultaneously enhancing the legitimacy of state governance by fostering greater cooperation with grassroots society.
Through the establishment of neighborhood Residents’ Committees aligned with local social realities, the CCP reinforced sociability (熟悉) among the residents and facilitated connections (聯係) between grassroots society and state institutions. These initiatives not only extended the state’s reach but also strengthened its legitimacy by integrating grassroots participation into urban governance.