“One ruler measures to the end”: Rule hardening in grassroots governance – taking a pilot project in urban renewal as an example

Abstract

Regarding launching an urban renewal project, rising social pressure makes the grassroots state harden the rules while the remaining high pressure from the top makes them keep rules elastic, the contradiction between which causes a dilemma in urban development nowadays. Taking a landmark pilot project as an example, via the observation of the practice of the rule-hardening principle described as “one ruler measures to the end”, this article tries to answer the question of how it is possible for power to reproduce its operational space under recently rising regulatory constraints. In this case, the principle of “rule hardening” includes both “results” and “process” and is fulfilled through a three-step mechanism of hardening in external conditions, hardening in compromising rules and hardening in the limitation of introducing pressure. Through this mechanism, the grassroots state manages to mobilize the resources embedded in the system and extend the hidden boundaries of the hard and rigorous rules on the surface that make the rules elastic and soft again, but in a more formal institutional and organizational way. This could be considered the state’s response to the rising social protests during the last phase and indicates a more subtle and less obvious manner of governance, which shows the continuous interaction between the state and the society in the long view of history.

Two decades of urban renewal: The demand and paradox of rule hardening

Since the 1990s, China has entered a stage of rapid urban renewal. This large-scale city renewal campaign has thus far been going on for nearly 30 years, and the original development-based renewal model seems to have come to an end. On the one hand, market drive has diminished. Currently, the remaining areas to be renovated in downtowns are mostly “bones” compared to “meat”, which area has already been developed in the past decades for large profit. Problems such as excessive density of indigenous people and excessive restrictions on late-stage development have led to very limited profit margins. On the other hand, social forces have increased, which is reflected in the popularity of relevant legal discourse and the empowerment of the rising availability of the Internet to citizen groups. At present, in the remaining areas, staff engaged in urban renewal encounter citizens living in poor conditions, with low economic status but high expectations for compensation, rich knowledge of legal rights maintenance, and full contact information, and thus social conflicts can easily occur due to carelessness. In reality, a great many projects have remained unfinished and difficult to sustain.

Under the original model, the state’s thirst for urban development spawned the combination of capital and power, from which the overwhelming force expelled the rules in the systematic practice at the initial stage of development, presenting a prominent feature of “flexibility”. For the society, in the same way, the logic of “nail households” ¹ with the tint of flexibility is also shaped in the interaction process with the state and market; beliefs that “honest people suffer loss” and “procrastinators gain profit” have become consensual among the people and have given rise to various kinds of individual measures for gaming evolving up until the present, rendering the renewal projects unaffordable in terms of time and economic costs. Therefore, how to break people’s expectations of “high price demolition” and reduce the gaming space for the grassroots is an important aspect in exploring urban renewal models in the new stage. Under such circumstances, in logic, the government develops the demand for reducing flexibility and increasing rigidity in systematic practice, attempting to break down citizens’ opportunities and resources of gaming through standardized and legal systems and reducing potential time, economic and social costs. This point has been verified in current practice. In the “New Shantytown Renovation Campaign” in recent years, renovation pilot projects in various places invariably took policy rigidity as their primary principle; for example, City P proposed “one ruler measures to the end” and City S proposed “being consistent in policy execution”, which unprecedentedly stressed the equity, fairness, openness and transparency of policies, as well as consistency in policy execution.

However, we should note that the demand for rule hardening has its own internal tension. As stated above, urban renewal in China has been taking place over two decades, and things have changed. Forces from society have become more prominent and require positive responses from the state government. However, at the same time, there is still an unchanged part. From the perspective of system and policy environment, the pressure-type political system remains unchanged. The state still regards urban construction and development as a task with multiple targets in the process of reform, an attitude which is constructing the legitimacy of sustained renewal and development from the aspects of politics, economy, society, culture, environment and technology. In other words, the top-down pressure on local government in urban development has been intensified rather than diminished. This has resulted in the fact that in project execution, the demand for system hardening that emerged to cut down social pressure faces the paradox generated by the government’s internal operation mechanism: the normative requirements brought about by rule hardening also compressed the power operation space for the government, hindering the government from fulfilling its political tasks under a high-pressure system. Therefore, the further attempt to break through the new dilemma through rule hardening would potentially put local government at the hinge between the state and the society (receiving pressure from both upper and lower levels), especially the grassroots government facing the dilemma of keeping a consistent logic between “soft” and “hard” systems: how can it both respond to society while shaping rule hardness and tightening the space for grassroots gaming and cope with the state while retaining the flexibility of rules and releasing the space for power operation in accomplishing a high-pressure political task?

This article takes as an example a pilot project which marks the transformation of the urban renewal model and the beginning of a new stage to study one of the new key principles; that is, how one ruler measures to the end, or, in other words, how the system is hardened. We cannot avoid the following questions: how should we deal with the above-mentioned paradox and dilemmas in hardening? After rule hardening, how can the necessary room for power operation in a system under high pressure be produced? Through analyzing the executing process of T Project, this article proposes a three-step mechanism of hardening of external conditions, hardening of concession rules and hardening of the bottom line, each step of which emerges as the project progresses. In its interactions with the society, the grassroots government constantly expands the connotations of rule hardening and transparency; brings in governance resources under a bureaucratic, high-pressure and campaign-oriented system; and, at last, constantly produces room for power operation under the seemingly restrictive hardening principle.

In this way, the new pilot project has balanced the internal tension in the dilemma within the demand for system hardening. Thus, a task that could hardly be accomplished under the original model has achieved results satisfying to all parties under the new model, setting a prototype for future work. The enlightening meaning of this is that the production of space for power operation is presented in a more formal, systematic and organizational form, embodying a more profound and implicit kind of governance technology, containing the rich wisdom of grassroots governance and demonstrating the mutual shaping process between the state and the society.

Tension and power operation practice in grassroots governance

Formality and informality in grassroots governance

Bringing “state” back into the analysis is one of the new trends in sociological studies in recent years, which have spawned a great many studies in the field of contentious politics and state governance. However, the majority of current studies are focused on the abstract and upper levels of the power structure in a state, rather than the grassroots governance that is in direct contact with the society at the tip of the administrative system, which makes sense given the huge change after the transformation of the power organization and operation model.

After the transformation, the tangible tip of power gradually retreated so that social forces can be released to some extent, making “how the state formulates rules and let the society obey the rules” (DY Huang, 2010) into a substantive issue in grassroots governance. In other words, in contrast with research on other levels, the research on grassroots governance should understand the power operation logic in the mutual infiltration with the society, stressing a kind of basic state power construction throughout the society (Mann, 2007: 69). The most prominent characteristic of this level is that the state and society converge and collide with one another from the top and bottom respectively, and the resulting tension has become one important factor that shapes the behaviors of the government and the people.

For many years, such tension between top and bottom has been labeled “formality” and “informality”, corresponding to the dual state–society framework. Here, the state is formal, embodied as the pressure system and bureaucratic system within the government, while the society is informal, lacking regulations, with low patterning and procedural level, especially referring to rural society in such studies. Shortage of governance resources is often taken as the background for making questioning about state governance and grassroots governance in China sustainable and effective. Such questioning is often carried out based on bridging the fractures between the two levels, and therefore many studies have noticed the informal elements generated from the organizational and practice process of the power tips in their permeation into the society. From the perspective of people and organizations, Philip Huang (2008) proposed the concept of “minimal governance”, summarizing the semi-administrative method of grassroots governance relying on informal officials in Chinese history, as well as the model involving social participation initiated by the state. Dongya Huang (2010) reviewed the governance strategies in all ways in the process of state power construction, including a great deal of semi-formal and semi-information strategies relying on informal bureaucrats, mobilization, and official social organization and self-organization of the people. In terms of systematic practice, Sun and Guo (2000) proposed the “informal operation of formal power”. Through analyzing the ordered grain-collecting process in a town in North China, the two scholars revealed how power in the times of the post-unit system was intensified with the help of local resources beyond formal power. Ying and Jin (2002) illustrated the informal operation of the grassroots political system in executing state policies through flexibility. Ouyang (2009) focused on the township entities and further expounded on the systematic and social basis for the informal operation required by township governments, from the unique position of the township “between the upper and lower levels”. Such studies have revealed how the grassroots governance in China operates continuously with limited resources, in which the informal elements have played the role of enriching governance resources and linking governance rules to a great extent. Thus, flexibility in power operation and distortion in system execution have also become the consensus in academic circles on the characteristics of governance in China.

Without doubt, previous studies have revealed the unique and important logic in grassroots governance in China, demonstrating very strong explanatory power even at present. Up to the present time, with the deepening of transformation as well as the construction of a service-oriented government and law-based country, the rationalization of the whole society is being intensified, giving rise to some new phenomena, which can make up for the present status.

Most of the above-mentioned studies take grassroots society in rural areas as an example, which is quite different from grassroots society in urban areas in two respects. First, the scarcity of resource in grassroots society in urban areas is not so prominent in rural areas; especially in the hearts of megacities, the grassroots superior governments are closer to each other and interact more frequently, and thus the resource mobilization ability in urban areas is stronger. Second, compared with villagers, citizens in urban areas have a lower degree of non-stylization but stronger ability to learn about regulations, so they are more receptive to formalized programs. In facing citizens, the two points of differences reduced the “tension between upper and lower levels” due to shortages of resources for grassroots government, but increased the rule tension induced by systematic deformation. To be specific, taking the field of urban renewal at present as an example, with decades of practices and the construction of legal systems for the state, citizens have acquired the formal discourse of laws and rights and the ability to engage in formal procedures such as petitions and lawsuits to some extent, so that the permeation between the state and society is no longer unidirectional and informal; on the contrary, the society can also match the formal part at the tip of the state power, seemingly cultivating a kind of “reverse permeation” ability (L Xiao, 2013). ² The society develops restrictions on the power process after using some formal elements and forces the grassroots government to cultivate the demand of formalized operation, which is hardening the conventional and power-oriented flexibility space in the systematic practice to some extent and in a certain way. In other words, the originally crude, arbitrary and direct power-executing methods have been reduced, and the grassroots government is exploring a kind of seemingly more programmatic and more stylized – while more delicate and covert – governance technique, in some cases, even at the cost of mobilizing large amounts of administrative resources. This constitutes an underlying driving force for the current governance transformation. Although previous literature contains few specialized discussions on this topic, it is in line with the observations of many scholars. ³ However, it needs to be specially emphasized that this “formalized operation” still has distinctive Chinese characteristics. It is not strictly following the rules as though operating under a western bureaucracy; rather, it is more like an attempt to produce room for power operation in an upward and unique way. In other words, the formalization and standardization embodied in formalized operation are more like means than ends. Therefore, as far as its relationship with informal operation is concerned, it is not a substitution, but a kind of supplement. Its purpose is to deal with the increasing pressure from rules due to the strengthening of society’s ability to respond to the formal level of the country. The ultimate goal is still the production of power operation room, but, under the current circumstances, the core question can be defined as this: how is it possible to realize the reproduction of power operation space within increasing regulatory constraints?

Flexibility and hardening in systems operations

For a long period, academic discussion has put special emphasis on the flexible and informal operation mechanisms in observing Chinese society. The concept of “flexibility” was first proposed by Wang et al. (1997) by taking it as a unique mechanism in the market transformation process in China, and thus it possesses the dual connotations of system operation and system transition. In its original definition, “flexibility” precisely referred to the “operation of formal organizations according to informal procedures”. Its delicacy is that on the surface, the principles it follows and the goals it tries to achieve are consistent with the original system, but from the perspective of underlying connotations, goals after adjustment are not the same as or even run counter to the original system. The reason the flexibility mechanism is important is that it deeply demonstrates the particularity of Chinese society; that is, the segregation of structural bureaucracy and functional bureaucracy in the construction of state power since the 20th century has resulted in a low degree of substantial rationality in Chinese society; due to the alternation of the old and new systems during the transitional period, informal mechanisms have tended to be more important than formal mechanisms, and the impact of flexibility often crossed or even erased the institutional boundaries (Ying, 2006). Due to the profound explanatory power of flexibility on social phenomena, the split between systems texts and practices has become the consensus among researchers.

Against such a background, few studies have mentioned the hardening mechanism in systems operations. How can systems practice remain undistorted is a self-evident question in the western context, but it is tacitly believed to be an impossible question in the Chinese context. Scholars are concerned about the internal tension of the formal system in practice from different perspectives. Ying Xiao (2014) pointed out that from the perspective of the interactions between systems and life, under “the differential mode of association”, the differentiated practices of the formal system in specific contexts have, in reverse, resolved the value and legitimacy of universalism in self-expectations. From the “rule-breaching space” in urban areas, Chen (2013) revealed informality as a more and more important controlling element, in both the state’s governance over society and capital’s monopoly over the market, and the gray zone has thus become the common demand for the governor and the governed. In such informal gaming, formality itself and the ideal progress of the rule of law are sacrificed. It is thus clear that, for a long time, the rigidity of the system has lacked real driving force.

However, with the four decades of implementation of the reform and opening-up policy, modernity has permeated all aspects of society, and it seems that quantitative accumulation has brought about qualitative change, especially embodied in the simultaneous enhancement of internal and external constraints in systems practices. On the one hand, for government, the change from “macromanagement” to “micromanagement” has raised the degree of bureaucracy and rationality within the administrative system (Qu et al., 2009). This point has been extensively discussed. What is more important is the changes in the social domain, and scholars have coincidentally shown concern for the attribution to legal system construction by the various legal actions on the part of citizens (Chen, 2013; Dong, 2008; YQ Shi, 2015). Such ability for the “production of invisible power by the invisible” ⁴ marks the progress of society and modernity (Y Xiao, 2014), while at the same time the growing sense of rights/interests has become the external constraining force for systems operations in the social domain. It is thus clear that if the scholars who proposed the mechanism of flexibility had the insight to bring in the historical lens and the process perspective, 40 years of reform and opening-up have also produced their own “history” in the constant collisions between state and society. At present, increasingly rational and normative constraints in both internal and external (or top and bottom) directions have become new variables emerging in the mid-term transformation. How will they be combined with the flexible operation that has been tacitly accepted in previous practice? In other words, how can we rebuild the authority of the formal rules that were originally resolved? How can this authority turn from “being superficial” to “becoming substantial”? ⁵

Therefore, this article attempts to bring rule hardening into the domain of the discussion by taking the phased characteristics in the process of transformation and embedding them into the long-term, profound and macroscopic history and the accumulation of practices in the transition at present for discussion. Under such a premise, there are two main aspects of the differences between hardening and flexibility. First, from the perspective of process and the results of practice, flexibility stresses the “deformation” in practice, and the “seemingly consistent but not completely the same” qualities between results and the original plan, or even running in the opposite direction. However, seen from the case in this study, hardening stresses consistency in the process of policy execution, at least, from the perspective of policy executors; “staying undistorted” is an important principle, and the final results should meet the preset baseline. Second, from the perspective of the motivation mechanism, previous cases of research on flexibility take complying with the public will as the direction, with motivation from the bottom and constraints from above, and the constraints normally come from the upper levels of the administrative system. ⁶ But the case in this article is on the reverse side; against the background of an era in a new phase, rule hardening aims to constrain people’s increasing ability at gaming, although the government has to restrict its own behavior as the premise in system implementation. In other words, in this case, the motivation is on the upper level, and the constraints come from the lower levels, forming tension between the promotion of hardening and public opinion.

However, despite the differences mentioned above, from the perspective of research, this article is still focused on discussing the power operation mechanism. In this respect, they match each other. The study on “flexibility” stresses taking a kind of social phenomenon of practice status as the research object of sociology and taking the event-based process as the starting point in studying the status of practice, then observing the mobility of power and the incremental part in practice by exploring the logic of reproduction (Sun, 2002; Ying, 2006). This article follows this paradigm; however, after the requirement of rule hardening was introduced, the internal tension in the power operation process became more prominent. Specifically, flexibility is concerned with the production of space for power operation in practice, and the system presents flexibility, while hardening requires the tightening of space for power operation, in which case the system presents rigidity. However, the complexity of the question is that under the pressure-oriented system in China, the goal for the tightening of space for power operation is its re-production. In other words, in the face of the more complicated social pressures and social risks that currently exist, those in power need to conceal the reproduction of space for power operation in a more secretive logic under the seemingly hardening formal rule so as to obtain more legitimacy. Therefore, discussion on hardening cannot take place without an understanding of flexibility. ⁷

Thus, in this article, “hardening” and “flexibility” are not presented as lying poles apart; rather, they are treated as different forms of the same logic at different stages. The key to explaining the hardening mechanism in the new era lies in finding out the boundaries in building flexibility and rigidity in governance practice and differentiating the clues for their applicable levels. In this case, rule hardening has established distinctive rigidity under the principle of “result hardening” on the one hand; on the other hand, it has reserved space tacitly under the principle of “process hardening”. Through advancement by three mechanisms – hardening of external conditions, hardening of the concession rules and hardening of the pressure baseline – and through its interaction with society, the grassroots government has expanded the boundary between transparency expropriation and consistency of policy from the surface to the center, thus releasing a kind of stylized, organizational and formal space for flexibility layer by layer.

Through such a process we can see that the reconstruction of the authority of formal rules at present was not initiated from scratch, nor did it take place in a Utopia; it grew up on the previous ground of flexibility through interactions with society. Viewed in this way, it seems rigid, but in fact it is highly flexible. It requires executors to take a proper measure and balance in the development of the situation. It can be regarded as the state’s re-correction and shaping of the society that it had shaped in the early stages.

Fieldwork and method

The T Project is located in the downtown area of City P. For specific reasons, this area needs to be restored to green space after renovation, space which will not yield any subsequent income, and thus it cannot be promoted with commercial capital. The project involves more than 2400 households, including 57 simple buildings (public property rights) built in the 1960s and 1970s. These public buildings are the product of a shortage economy in the socialist period. The area has extended its service so far, creating prominent livelihood problems, and the need for reform is urgent. In addition, after the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, a large number of self-built houses were built in the corridors of the courtyard for self-occupation or operation. There were 2123 houses of this kind in total, almost the same as the number of officially acknowledged households. Because there are Class-A hospitals in the surrounding area, these simple buildings and self-built houses are used as part of an informal economy. They are used for catering, groceries and temporary accommodations; thus, stable operating income has raised residents’ psychological expectations. Therefore, although the project was put on the agenda more than 10 years ago, it has been difficult to have such buildings removed due to two major problems: funding balance difficulties and residents’ unrealistic expectations regarding compensation.

The background to project initiation: The Zhezi project

City P is the political and cultural center of China, and the Zhezi project, hereafter referred to as “T Project” is located in the core area of the city. It is an important carrier of City P’s and even China’s image, possessing high political significance. In recent years, population evacuation, function adjustment and the promotion of historical and cultural values have become the focus of work in City P and the district government where the project is located. In this context, the legitimacy, necessity and urgency of the continuous renewal of the old city have once again been highlighted, and T Project has been put on the agenda again. In 2015, with the joint operation of municipal and district governments, T Project was included in the “City P 2015 Shanty Town Reconstruction and Environmental Remediation Tasks” and the “2013–2017 National Ten Million Shanty Town Reconstruction Plan” and was listed as City P’s “Zhezi Project” in that year. ⁸ As a result, T Project has received a lot of policy support and solved the front-end resource dilemma: on the one hand, it was approved for loans from the China Development Bank and supplemented by financial support from both municipal and district governments, which basically solved the financing problems of the project; on the other hand, in exploring the method of integrating the renovation of shanty towns and the housing guaranteeing system, the district government has established a strategic partnership with the Municipal Affordable Housing Investment Center to obtain land for the construction of settlement houses, and it has implemented 4160 resettlement houses, which basically met the conditions for starting the project.

However, behind a large portion of policy resources is a high-pressure political environment. The “Zhezi Project”, the official term in City P for T Project, refers to a key engineering project that is under the authority of the city’s deputy mayor and coordinated by the relevant committees, offices, bureaus and production units. It requires clear tasks, time limits and responsibilities to ensure implementation, resembling task fulfilling under a military order. T Project is City P’s first pilot project that implements the policy of renovation of shanty towns and the land-acquisition process. It is also the largest simple building-vacating project in the core urban area to date. It is of milestone significance. Thus, the project set up a headquarters directly in charge of the main leaders of the district, getting organized in a high-level and high-pressure manner. In principle, no failure is allowed, and the project must be completed in the same year. Clearly, T Project is quite different from the original model in terms of resources and personnel. This is a project with distinctive government characteristics. The effectiveness of its implementation is directly related to the political achievements of the incumbent officials. The top-down pressure is fundamentally directed to the construction of power operation space and the preservation of institutional flexibility.

Rule hardening: “Transparent land acquisition”

In addition to the top-down pressure within the government, T Project is also facing potential bottom-up pressure. One major type of bottom-up pressure is the residents’ expectations of “big-money demolition”. Residents’ high expectations come from several different sources. The first source is the compensation standards of previous commercial development and demolition projects in the surrounding area; a second source is the housing demand arising from the expansion of a family’s life cycle; families regard relocation as the only opportunity to improve their housing conditions. Not only do they look forward to living in separate apartments designed for a large family with several generations; many grandparents also consider the housing needs of older grandchildren when the grandchildren are ready to start families. A third source of residents’ high expectations is the differences in infrastructure between different locations; Residents believe that the original site is a golden zone with top green spaces, Class-A hospitals and key primary schools. A fourth source is the current higher operating income from public housing and self-built housing.

If the residents’ compensation expectations are not met, based on past experience, various individual or collective games as following may be triggered and the bottom-up pressure may progress from potential to reality. The most direct form is individual gaming: residents may use their families as a unit to protest passively; that is, they refuse to cooperate with the relocation and become “nail households”, hoping to get more benefits, or they may actively protest by resorting to relevant government departments or sensitive places such as Tiananmen Square to petition, sit quietly to protest or to exert pressure on the executor. Since the project is in the form of centralized relocation, moreover, with the organizational convenience provided by the WeChat group, once dissatisfaction spreads it may trigger collective action. As T Project is located in the core urban area, only a few kilometers away from the central government, a small amount of trouble means political risk for local governments. In other words, the high-pressure political environment and sensitive geographic location have boosted the residents’ chance to make the personal issue be a public one in order to win the game, making the government prudent in resolving the potential bottom-up pressure.

In this case, in order to start T Project, other than resolving the resource shortage, it was also necessary to break the deep-rooted logic of nail households; that is, to eliminate family's expectations for money and houses that is far beyond the standard set by the compensation rules and tighten the possible space for individual or collective actions fighting for more compensation. Thus, there is a demand for reducing flexibility and enhancing rigidity in system practice, which is reflected in the principle of “transparent vacating, consistent policy, one ruler measures to the end”. In implementation, rule hardening is reflected in two specific aspects. One is result hardening, reflected in the final compensation results for each household. T Project has formulated a “moderate” and “reasonable” compensation standard based on the overall resource situation. ⁹ Taking the rule “two sets of apartments for one household” as the baseline, it should not be breached under any circumstances. The other aspect of rule hardening is process hardening, reflected in the normalization of the whole land-acquisition process. The project proclaimed that it adopted the “full process transparency” approach for the first time, and the six important links in the entire process were disclosed to all residents involved in the expropriation. It is worth noting that although the goal of transparent land acquisition is to restrain citizens and weaken their ability in gaming in the “nail household” way. The policy implementation process is based on restraining the government’s own behavior. Transparent land acquisition requires transparent government, reflecting the counterforce from society to the state, posing the requirement of regulating power operation procedures, accepting extensive surveillance of grassroots governments, namely, the requirement of formal operation, and thus the space for power operation is compressed.

Results of the project

T Project typically reflects the dilemma in rule hardening under the current renewal mode. The increasing social pressure demands a positive response to society from the state, while these kinds of projects tend to have a strong political quality as a continuation of the high-pressure system. Thus, how to accomplish tasks in the context of emphasizing regulations – in other words, how to create flexibility under rigid constraints – has become the greatest challenge for grassroots staff at the beginning of the project, who may ask: “Now that we have the compensation results settled, what else can we use to negotiate with residents?” Thus, at the beginning of this project, none of the levels of the related departments were optimistic. The compensation plan stipulated that 85% of the residents of each building needed to sign a contract to officially start the expropriation. “One-third of the people would easily move, another 1/3 would move after mobilization, and the remaining 1/3 would hardly move away”, a grassroots staff member initially estimated.

Surprisingly, with a task that was considered very difficult from top to bottom at first and had no special advantages over the surrounding area in terms of the compensation standard, the final effect far exceeded expectations. Firstly, the contracts were signed rapidly, yielding a high signing rate. During the three-month awarding contract-signing period, all 57 buildings reached the 85% official start-up ratio requirement, and the total signing rate was as high as 94%. By the end of the contract period, only 101 households had failed to sign contracts. Secondly, there were few cases of petitioning and few disturbances, so the social costs were low. During the contract-signing period, there were no large-scale, long-term petitions or crowd protests. There were only individual petitions at the headquarters, the house selection site and in front of the district government, which mainly resulted from family conflicts and were rarely aimed at the government. Thirdly, policy rigidity was realized in principle. So far, no household has surpassed the baseline of “one property certificate is entitled at most to two resettlement houses”. There is only room for floating in the one-time financial support (40,000 yuan) for “serious illness subsidy”, and in the later period this was subject to audit. Fourthly, the compensation was moderate, and the economic costs could be controlled. After breaking the logic of nail households, according to the estimation of the staff of the demolition company, the project saved the cost of nearly 1000 resettlement houses.

Research methods and significance

This study uses participant observation and case study as its main methods. I did a site survey on the sub-district office of T at the time of the implementation of T Project. I then had the opportunity to participate in the daily work of office staff at the project headquarters and conducted interviews with the horizontal district-level departments participating in T Project through the channels of the district government (Housing Expropriation Office, Major Project Construction Command Office, Housing Administration Bureau, etc.). During the three-month pre-signing period for residents, we followed the staff to visit and talk to the residents, attended the seminars between primary-level staff and residents, attended the work meetings of the sub-command posts and general headquarters, and joined the WeChat group of vacating residents. Through engagement during the entire pre-signing period, we accumulated a large amount of first-hand material. After that, we still followed up regularly, observed the follow-up on-site house selections and paid a return visit to the first group of residents who moved into the resettlement housing community. The later work is still going on, and our observations and research will continue.

Compared with existing research, the typicality of this case is reflected in two aspects. First, unlike other studies that observed the daily operations of the sub-district office, this study goes deeply into the specific practices of a major urban renewal pilot T Project of the sort that easily triggers conflicts, and observes the specific processes of interactions between authorities and residents, and presents the details of the power operation. Second, my study makes full use of the special external conditions of T Project to clarify the logic of the power operation. As mentioned above, compared with similar projects in other cities, due to its special geographical location, the coexistence of political pressure embodied in the Zhezi project and the social pressure embodied in the transparent expropriation in T Project as well as the more prominent tension between upper and lower levels have made it a rare case.

The three-layer mechanism in rule hardening

T Project marks a key turning point in the evolution of the current urban renewal model. The grassroots government is facing pressure from society and has a need for rule hardening (overt). At the same time, the old city renewal as a major political task continues the original high-pressure model, making consistent institutional flexibility indispensable (covert). Therefore, the practice of rule hardening must take the tension between the two aspects into account, so power still retains the potential for flexible operation in the seemingly open and transparent formalized operations. In this section, the three mechanisms of hardening of external conditions, hardening of concession rules and hardening of the pressure baseline will be discussed so as to reveal how the interactions between grassroots government and society grasp the opportunity and scale of rule hardening, and expand the boundary between transparent expropriation, and consistency of policy from surface to center, thus releasing a kind of stylized and organizational room for flexibility layer by layer.

Hardening of external conditions

As a landmark new starting point, T Project did not start from scratch. Therefore, how to draw a line from past experiences is the primary issue in project implementation. The executor clearly marked T Project as a “government project” and attributed past experiences to a “developer project” to show the difference between them. The government project aims to highlight the attribute of public welfare of the project, emphasizing that the project is a “danger-relief project” and “pro-people project” in which the government invests financial funds to solve residential problems for residents, rather than a “prosperity project” with commercial development in the later stages. ¹⁰ The attempt at rule hardening was carried out based on this emphasis. In official propaganda, the project was embodied in two basic principles: the first was result hardening, “one ruler measures to the end”, “be consistent in policy”; the second was process hardening, which demonstrated the transparency of the whole process with the “six principles of publicity”. Both were the first attempts in City P.

Old-city renewal involves demolition and relocation. The primary conflict of interests lies in the resettlement compensation rules (what should be paid, what should not be paid, etc.) and the steps in implementation (the methods of measurement and negotiation, etc.). From the very beginning, T Project tightened up the opportunities and resources available for gaming by means of three methods: compensation rule simplification, division of implementation links, and decentralized supervision in external condition hardening.

Simplified compensation rules

Compensation rules are the basis and core of negotiation during demolition. T Project greatly simplified the past compensation rules. First, it proposed “taking the areas of houses to be expropriated as the basis” and “not taking into consideration the demographic factor in principle” in terms of compensation rules, and thus condensing the room for negotiation due to demographic structure and its potential expansion. Second, the determination of the area of a house is only applicable to official houses with official certificates (house ownership certificate, house sales contract after house reform, public house lease contract). Even in cases where there were different records in the form of property ownership certificates for houses within the same building and of the same house type, the information was not to be revised. Thus, room for negotiation created by the identification process was avoided. Most importantly, for the first time, T Project specified not providing additional compensation for self-built houses, thus attempting to exclude the most complicated part of the room for negotiations based on self-built houses from the very beginning.

Affected by historical events such as the Tangshan earthquake, the return of educated young people to the city and the expansion of the population in the life cycle of residents’ families, many self-built houses built in different historical periods had accumulated in the area of T Project. Many of them were officially approved by their units or the Housing Administration Bureau. According to previous experiences, this aspect of houses is generally treated according to established facts, to distinguish whether there is legitimacy or necessity in its formation history to some extent, and then to form a specific plan according to the completion time, property rights and nature of the house, which will give residents plenty of opportunities and discourse resources for gaming considering whether or not these self-built houses should be compensated and how to differentiate them from the formal ones in the compensation rules. After repeated discussions, it was decided to completely change the rule in T Project, tracing self-built houses back to the original cause of “living difficulties”, and solving this problem with two strategies: one strategy was to treat all families in shanty towns as having living difficulties to a certain degree and to offer each household a 40% subsidy coefficient (that is, whether there was a self-built house or not, the final compensation amount was calculated by multiplying the area registered on the property ownership certificate by 1.4); second, if the self-built house was indeed used for self-occupation (rather than business), the household was considered a “family with special difficulties in living” and could apply to the project executive department for “reward housing” (the second suite) and subsequent public rental housing to ensure the real demand for housing. The substantial significance of this change is that the bargaining space for self-built houses that might have been used by residents was included in the formal administrative procedures (approval of the qualification for the second set of “reward housing for families with difficulties in living”), which reduced space for individualized games as try to get more compensation by personal non-cooperation in contract signing or petition to higher level of government.

Specific steps of implementation

Beyond the compensation rules, the executor of the rules and the method of execution can also affect the results directly. In past development cases, the demolition company would take charge of the whole demolition process. The employees of the demolition company had a lot of resources in the process of negotiating with the residents, and there was a lot of room for individual operation. This was also one of the deep-rooted reasons for the logic of nail households. Therefore, the execution process of T Project was re-designed to restrict the power of the third party, condense the room for negotiating with residents and harden the process of execution. The new process had the following characteristics.

First, the executive process could be broken down into specialized steps. Professional teams were introduced at every step of the project procedure of T Project by means of government purchasing of services such as the investigation company and evaluation company in the early stages, the demolition company in the middle stages, and the legal and notarization services, as well as the auditing company, in the later stages. This arrangement has reduced the scope of responsibility and power scale of the demolition company, preventing it from forming stable relations with residents, and reducing the possibility of secret bargaining.

Second, the method of motivation was changed. Most of the demolition companies provided a whole package of contracting services; that is to say, on the premise of accomplishing the task, the less compensation they offered to residents, the more income they would obtain for the demolition companies and staff. T Project changed the rules by paying “demolition service fees” to the demolition company in accordance with certain rules. Each contracted household would receive a certain service fee (different standards were set according to the situation). The final income of the demolition staff was the unit price multiplied by the number of households successfully signed, regardless of the amount of compensation given to each household. This rule greatly reduced the personal operation space of the demolition agent in negotiations.

This change also transformed the power relations between the employees of the demolition company and the grassroots government staff. Since demolition agents no longer determined the scale of flexibility, they could only play a more technical role, offering some policy explanations, compensation calculations, procedure notifications and errands. More complex issues, such as family conflict mediation, recognition of qualifications, and coordination with related units, required the use of specific skills and administrative resources by grassroots government staff. This potentially transferred the negotiation space between residents and demolition agents, which was originally beyond the control of the government, to the internally organized and institutionalized workflow of the government.

Decentralization of supervision

“Whole-process transparency” is another important objective that was declared by the T Project piloted in City P for the first time. It specifically refers to the complete publicity of six important processes: expropriation procedures, survey results, compensation plans, compensation results, housing conditions and supervision methods. It was intended to decentralize supervision and ensure the rigidity of results with process transparency. It was mainly achieved by introducing technological means, which was the highly visible and eye-catching point of the project. The most eye-catching feature at the site of T Project was the two large LED screens that stood outside. During the contract-signing period, the large screen continually updated the contract ratios of each building and branch headquarters in real time, creating a transparent and open atmosphere. Behind the screen was a house-expropriation software system called the “Electronic Agreement Management System for House Expropriation and Compensation on State-owned Land”, which was launched in City P for the first time. After the investigation and evaluation were completed, the staff imported the data on each household into the system. Then the system would automatically generate the “Notice of Project Acquisition and Compensation to Resident” and the “Acquisition and Compensation Agreement” and record the signing time of each agreement. The media emphasized in reports that the system had “query” and “lock” functions. “After signing a contract, a resident can enter his/her ID number in the equipment at the signing site, and he can see not only his own contract status, but also neighbors’ contract statuses”; if the information was modified, the “track of modification” was on the computer. “It is clear that at a glance, we can see which staff member is performing the operation.” Therefore,

how much compensation was paid to other people, how much money they were rewarded, and how many suites were bought are completely disclosed to ensure that the policies of the first contract and the last contract within the agreement period are exactly the same. ¹¹

Thus, T Project provided support for process hardening by introducing technological means.

As the most basic system design, the above three aspects clearly set a benchmark for T Project to herald in a “new phase”, hoping to make citizens feel a huge difference from the past and thus change their expectations of the game. This section focuses on the analysis of the initial system. It is still difficult to see the characteristics of the “space for reproduction of power operation” in practice. However, the intricacy behind the above-mentioned institutional innovations can be felt: on the one hand, the informal negotiation space that can be constructed by the individual is hardened and tightened; on the other hand, the space has been rewoven into a set of formal procedures that require government approval, thereby strengthening the government’s control over the entire process. The “formalized operation” that this article focuses on seems to emerge.

Hardening of concession rules

Under the initial rules, a small number of residents with a strong willingness to relocate, simple family structures and better economic conditions took the lead in signing the contract, giving the project a small good start, but plunging it into trouble. In the face of unprecedented compensation rules, most residents held a wait-and-see attitude, and T Project began to stagnate. At this time, political pressure from the authorities and social pressure from society created a difficult situation, and the paradox in rule hardening began to take shape: system rigidity reduced the possibilities for personal gaming for more money and houses on the part of citizens, and it also compressed the original operating space of the executor. Therefore, the biggest operational problem under the new rules is this: given the compensation results, “what do I have left for bargaining with the residents?” In other words, if the contract cannot be signed by bargaining over the specific amount of compensation as it was in the past, how can a negotiation space be constructed that can accommodate both parties’ space for bargaining without affecting the rigidity of the new rules?

Thus, the logic of rule hardening shifted from the overt external conditions in the early stages to the practical logic implicitly expanded in the middle and late stages. Despite the restrictions of the new rules, with the progress of the project, the original governance resources that existed in the bureaucratic system have constantly been revitalized and added into the negotiations to facilitate successful signing. But compared with the “black box operation” criticized in the past, the extension of this negotiation space takes institutional rigidity as its premise. Following the aforementioned hardening of external conditions, institutional rigidity has been expanded into a hardening that emphasizes procedures rather than substantial content; that is, it emphasizes the standardization, openness and transparency of procedures in the implementation process. In other words, institutional hardening does not mean that negotiations must not be compromised, but it is emphasized that the release of space for concession must be an administrative, organizational and institutionalized behavior. In this article, this is called “hardening of concession rules”. As a result, the personal and informal negotiation space that originally existed between residents and demolition agents has been embedded in the operations of the bureaucratic system, allowing the government to expand the flexible space by constructing procedures and calling for organizational resources. This is the most typical manifestation of the formalized operation that this article is trying to describe. In T Project, it is reflected in the step-by-step release of profit space, the institutional construction of room for relaxation, and the bureaucratic advancement of space for negotiation.

Step-by-step release of profit space

T Project provides government resettlement houses far below market prices. Therefore, the number of houses is an important part of the game for more compensation. As a matter of fact, in the early stages of the project, the government basically replaced one household with two houses, but instead of giving out the two sets of houses at once, they deliberately constructed the houses as a step-by-step release. In the resettlement compensation rules, the first set is referred to as the “targeted resettlement house”, a property exchange with the original housing of the residents in the relocation area, with each household being entitled to one house. The second set of houses is different. It is called “reward housing for families with living difficulties”, and families who meet the conditions of “living difficulties” have to apply for it on their own and can only purchase after publicity, investigation and review, and final approval by the headquarters. As a result, a series of administrative procedures during the implementation of the project reserved room for negotiation.

Even so, in the process of project advancement they encountered unexpected difficulties. The complexity of the household structure in T Project was beyond imagining, and indeed some households were in very poor situations. They usually actually lived in this area with parents and children, had poor financial statuses, or had experienced several marriages, and families of the different marriages lived together. Most of their offspring lived in self-built houses, and one household even had seven or eight self-built rooms. Even if these families applied for the second housing set as a reward, they could still hardly manage to live separately from their siblings in the two sets of houses. They became the biggest obstacle to the project after policy hardening. Many people held the belief that “the government would not let us live on the street” and waited for the government to come up with a second plan and make concessions to the baseline of “one household, two sets of houses”, spreading rumors during the process of signing contracts.

To tackle this problem, in the middle and late stages of signing contracts, the government once again released a third type of resettlement housing: public rental housing. Compared with public rental housing obtained through other channels, public rental housing in this project could be approved much more quickly with lower uncertainty and was adjacent to the location of formal resettlement housing. In the same way, residents in “families with difficulties in directly getting public rental housing” first had to apply for the rental housing, after which the application had to be approved by the command, re-checked by the district-level government and filed by the municipal government. Differing from the release of the second set of housing within the original plan, the public rental housing was just a tentative plan in the initial stages of program execution and lacked specifications for operation. Its implementation was promoted following coordination by the command with municipal and district-level governments and cross-functioning departments during program implementation to try to solve actual problems. ¹² Due to differences in property rights, the introduction of public rental housing not only solved the actual difficulty in housing for some residents, but also made a clear distinction from the house that was counted in the compensation rules, so that it did not violate the policy rigidity of the whole program and tactfully maintained the boundary between policy flexibility and rigidity. It is thus clear that through the phased release of policy resources, the grassroots government managed to constantly create forms of institutionalization to release room for benefits based on result rigidification in the form of “two sets of housing for each household”.

Institutional construction of room for rule-breaking

Other than the direct release of more types of resettlement houses, the hardening of the concession principle is also reflected in the institutional debugging of policy applicability. The prominent characteristic of old-city area renewal lies in its complexity. For example, T Project involved a registered population of 8169 and 6004 households. In their daily lives, in the past five decades, the residents might have experienced birth, old age, sickness and death, divorce or remarriage, separation of registered place and residence place, domestic migration or migration between countries, and even accidental disappearance. In terms of historical legacy, there were more than a dozen units which owned the original property rights in the project. During the planned economy period, several families lived together due to housing distribution and relocation. After the housing reform, there were problems such as incomplete implementation of housing-reform houses and failure to alter the original tenancy agreement after a death. Such issues directly affected the specific operation in the process of signing contracts. Therefore, it is difficult to design a package of policies applicable to thousands of households at the dawn of a project, and this is an important reason for the difficulty in realizing policy rigidity in the past.

The staged release of interests created room for negotiation for both parties. But this was just the first step, and it needed to enter a more challenging stage of negotiation. The negotiation focused on the applicability of the policy to specific conditions of each household; for example, whether a household was eligible to apply for the first, second and public rental housing, and which family member should do the application. After the project reached a stalemate, a great many cases emerged in which the second set of housing could be obtained reasonably but could not be realized due to simplified initial settings of policies. That became the obstacle hindering the signing of these households. ¹³ In order to facilitate signing, the project executor constantly made slight adjustments to the policy boundaries based on the baseline of “two sets of apartments for one household” to enhance their applicability. In T Project, this was presented in the supplementary paths of mechanism and content.

In terms of mechanism, a set of “special case reporting” procedures were determined for T Project which were called “submitting for review (by the general headquarters)”. Among the specific problems for each household, any cases that are not definitely in line with policy stipulations belong to “special cases”, and four steps should be taken to determine if they are applicable after slight adjustments of policies. First, the staff in charge of the household prepare the explanation materials and supporting documents, fill in the “special case approval form” and submit the materials to the problem-handling group for discussion. Second, the problem-handling group discusses the case to form a consensus and submits it to the office of the general headquarters. Third, the general headquarters holds routine meetings, and each branch headquarters puts forward specific cases and supporting materials for discussion by each member unit to state their opinions; if on-site visits are required, the office will organize on-site work. The meeting is recorded by a dedicated person, and later the meeting minutes are drafted and archived. Finally, cases approved ¹⁴ by the general headquarters meeting are issued by the office with a written opinion on that household and sent back to the relevant branch headquarters to be stored in the archives as the basis when the household signs the contract. This process institutionalized the previous individualized game for rule-breaking such as one-on-one negotiating with the staff from the demolishing company or protesting as a “nail household”. Here, the decision of whether to make a slight adjustment on the policy was made collectively through the organizational process, which reflects the procedural transparency embodied in the rule hardening. In addition, the gathering of hundreds of special cases also gave rise to a self-improving mechanism of the policy, and common problems were summed up to be re-issued in the form of a “supplementary explanation” for initial rules or case analysis. It is of great significance in terms of case law and for comparison and reference by grassroots staff in their future work.

During the three-month signing period, to solve the specific problems that constantly emerged, the general headquarters issued 10 supplementary explanations for the initial compensation plan. Such explanations were equally effective with the original plan in implementation. The contents can mainly be summarized as three types of problems: first, problems related to the original ownership holder or the applicant for a temporary dwelling; second, problems related to early-stage procedures, such as selling housing-reform houses and alterations of applicants; third, problems related to the original owners of the property. It could be said that the package of successive supplementary explanations is a specific presentation of the precise practice of slight adjustment of policy boundaries within the range of the bottom line by the government. Through the above-mentioned supplementary paths of mechanism and content, when the staff tried to solve the problems for each household they formed a kind of self-adjustment mechanism for rules in terms of organization; in this way, the policy applicability could be produced constantly in the process of policy execution.

The bureaucratic progress of room for bargaining

Objectively speaking, the results of the hardening of “two sets of apartments for one household” did constrain the room for negotiation to a large extent, forcing the grassroots government to continually involve other resources in the process of project advancement and seek new possibilities in multiple directions. Therefore, other than the flexible room under the premise of constructing “rule hardening” through organized and formal means in the aspects of interests and procedures, there was another method of starting from the “people” in T Project, which was promoting negotiation through hierarchical sequence of the subject of negotiation.

Many studies have found that the state governance in China has characteristics of both a bureaucracy and a campaign and is composed of two sets of interwoven organizations: the vertical organization executes the will of power, while the horizontal network integrates departmental resources. In T Project, both the vertical and horizontal systems make up a “network of power and professionals”, ¹⁵ in which the headquarters can call any member in the network and let them negotiate with residents, with the member’s status and resources being empowered by their unique position in the network. Through the constant changes and upgrading of different working staff in terms of expertise and authority, they continually created room for negotiation between the government and residents.

At the initial stages of signing, the demolition agents at the bottom of the organizational network were pioneers under the new model. Despite many years of experience in demolition, when they began working under a model that put more emphasis than previously on policy, their expertise was far from that of the House Expropriation Center and Housing Administration Bureau; meanwhile, they lacked the authority of government officials. Therefore, the demolition agents had to do the most fundamental work – for example, helping residents work out specific amounts of compensation, informing potential subsidies and providing references for selecting relocating houses – and held few resources in hand to facilitate signing contracts. Fundamental though such work is, it is huge, and demolition agents had to maintain contact with each household and make explanations to build up the momentum for demolition.

The difficulty of signing increased with the progress of the project. Families of complicated structure came along. These families usually have several generations living together in several very small rooms and with prominent internal contradictions caused by longstanding poverty, and the problems in such families could not be solved only by relying on policy propaganda and compensation calculations. Therefore, the duties of negotiation fell on the grassroots government. From demolition agents to district working staff, the authority upgrades and the resources that facilitate negotiation have been expanded. To be specific, the first resource is the individual skills of grassroots cadres in resolving family disputes, the second is the public trust of grassroots government in interfering with family disputes, and the third is the administrative power and resources held by the grassroots government (application, approval and checking, and applying for other subsidies for specific groups, such as the disabled). Among government officials, authority over the object of negotiation tends to descend via the sequence of the staff member in charge of a household-section chief in charge of a building-department head in charge of a branch headquarters. When the complexity of room for negotiation is constantly constructed, it also reduces the risk of failure in negotiations between individuals of a hierarchy and residents due to unsuitable strategies.

If it is difficult to reach a consensus, the issue can be reported to working staff or leaders of corresponding functional departments rather than to local branch headquarters; for example, asking the Housing Administration Bureau about questions related to real estate or asking the Housing Expropriation Office about policy-related questions. Finally, before the deadline of the signing date, the general headquarters especially established a “conversation group”, which embodies the supreme level of authority (members from the general headquarters) and expertise (cadres from the Housing Expropriation Office). Like the above-mentioned supplementary rules, the change of negotiators of different levels also showed the constant calling upon resources within the bureaucracy in the progress of negotiation and the practice of constructing a formalized flexibility by the grassroots government.

Therefore, we cannot say no concessions were made in T Project; rather, institutionalization was emphasized in concession. In this way, concession is embedded in the operation of the bureaucratic system and becomes the upward and inward direction of power space expansion, which has rarely been discussed in the past. In this process, “two sets of apartments for one household” as the bottom line of the roles was transformed into “offering two sets of apartments as much as possible” in practice and thus earned a positive image for the government.

Hardening of the bottom line

Jointly boosted by the above strategies, the signing of the project was held as scheduled. Within 2 months, 1883 households signed contracts, and the social pressure on the project shrank in terms of area; however, the difficulty in point was aggravated. The signing entered the final sprint stage. Residents who had not signed a contract at this stage were either “hard nuts to crack” or had severe difficulties or sought huge benefits, and some other residents were still unwilling to change their original expectation for big money. Meanwhile, as the pre-signing period approached the deadline, inspections by higher leaders became more frequent, and political pressure within the bureaucracy also increased.

With the incremental difficulty for individuals to make a breakthrough, the above-mentioned institutionalized concession methods became less effective, and the path dependence of a pressure-oriented system emerged. The general headquarters proposed “multiple means to promote evacuation” and imposed on residents through law enforcement and organizational departments to further expand the space for power operations. But the biggest difference between T Project and past projects is that the legitimacy in the implementation process is especially emphasized without touching the bottom line of survival and morality. At this time, the third level of rule hardening can be presented in this way: the government’s discretion when using force, which is referred to in this article as “bottom-line hardening in giving pressure” and can be presented in the forms of “prudential law enforcement” and “restricted pressure application”.

Prudential law enforcement

There are well-known tertiary hospitals and specialized hospitals around T Project, attracting large numbers of people who come to see doctors and seek jobs. These people have a strong demand for catering, accommodation and small commodities, creating an active informal economy in this area. At the same time, for complicated historical reasons, the current public housing management is disorganized, and there have been no strict legal restrictions on subletting and subtenancy. In this context, there are quite a few public houses or self-built houses for rent in T Project. These houses have been changed from their original means of living to means of production in reality, deviating from the government’s original intention to improve people’s livelihoods. After the relocations of the project started, due to the daily incomes from the houses, ¹⁶ most of the residents were reluctant to sign contracts, and other residents maintained a wait-and-see attitude toward them and did not sign contracts. Consequently, the residents who had signed contracts felt that they had gotten a raw deal. After the project entered the sprint period, the general headquarters decided to strengthen law enforcement, put pressure on such illegal buildings and operations, and “carry forward demolition to promote relocation”. However, unlike in the past, the directors of T Project were very cautious when using force, strictly abided by legal procedures during the implementation process, and maintained a clear boundary when selecting targets for action.

The first boundary was the standardization of procedures. The dismantling had to go through several steps of notification, evidence collection and prosecution before it was finally launched in T Project. The first step was full notification. At the beginning of the project launch, the surrounding walls of nearby hospitals were posted with signs reading “Notice on Further Regulating the Management of Rental Housing”, and “notification letters” ¹⁷ were posted requiring residents to “self-inspect”. After this round of notifications, the shops along the street were basically shut down, but many informal business premises hidden in simple buildings were still in operation. Subsequently, the branch headquarters initiated formal law enforcement procedures. The first step was for street and community staff and the police in charge of the area to visit the rental houses at night and take photos to collect evidence. The second step was to post in the building the relevant regulations and provisions, stating the illegality of public housing rental and giving notice of actions that would be taken by the relevant government departments. The third step was to sue the householders who rented or illegally operated public housing through the housing management department and to urge them to come to sign the contract. Only under the circumstances of invalid prosecution and absence of the accused would the houses finally be dismantled through the comprehensive law enforcement department.

The second boundary was the selection of targets for action. T Project particularly emphasized the need to “give a precise action”; that is, the goal must be to promote the signing of the contract without causing negative social impact. The main principle of the branch headquarters in making and weighing choices was to determine whether the business behavior was engaged in to subsidize a poor family’s livelihood or just for profit, and the latter was the object of action. The goal was to alter the wait-and-see attitudes of residents and promote contract signing. Therefore, as long as the residents came to sign contracts, force would be withdrawn. ¹⁸

Restricted pressure application

Aiming at unsigned residents with no violations and no rentals, and on whom pressure could not be applied through law enforcement in the later stages of the project, consistent with existing research findings, the grassroots government called up social groups with strong and weak relationships with the protesters to pass on the pressure (Deng, 2017). However, T Project showed a more prudent and restricted attitude toward such relationship-control practices.

The first step in restricted pressure application was a round of formal pressure from organizations. In the later stages of the contract signing, the general headquarters instructed each branch headquarters to summon the “immediate relatives of unsigned households working within the state owned system”, contact their work units through the Organization Department of the district and apply pressure on them separately. Just before the deadline of the contract period, employees of the system among the unsigned residents were recruited to talk on the spot. The leaders of their units and the district authorities were also present (if the unsigned residents were teachers, there would be relevant personnel from the schools, the District Education Commission and the District Organization Department). On the day before the deadline of signing, each branch headquarters was assigned a cadre from the district Organization Department to coordinate organizational relations if necessary. As a matter of fact, applying pressure from organizations was not uncommon in the past. However, from field observations, the implementation of T Project was gentler and more formal than before. Specifically, the presence and full attendance of the relevant leaders did exert some pressure on residents who had not signed the contract, but the content of the on-site conversation itself was relatively moderate and caring for their feelings, and, in the end, personal choices were respected. ¹⁹

The second step was informal pressure from within society. T Project had an “interest binding” mechanism among residents: taking building as the unit and an 85% signing rate as the starting point for going into effect; that is to say, the acquisition decision became valid only when the proportion of households that finished pre-signing ²⁰ reached the standard. In addition, with the increase in the proportion signing from 85% to 100%, the residents of the whole building could get a “one-time award for reaching the signing rate” of about 50,000 to 150,000 yuan. The two rules drew on experiences in rundown urban areas of other cities in “self-governed reconstruction”, which were introduced to City P for the first time, so as to include the social forces that had been neglected before. Differing from the super-high requirement of 100% or 99% in the original experiences, T Project set the proportion to 85%, which indirectly showed its control over the range of pressure. Under the binding of interests, unsigned residents became the target of public criticism. If the project could only be started after 100% of the residents signed the contract by ignoring the actual situation of any household, this could easily cause some excessive behaviors; reducing the contract ratio to 85% meant that by introducing internal social pressure, there would still be a certain amount of space for independent trade-offs. In my investigation I found that with the approaching deadline, the ways in which residents exerted pressure on each other were escalating, from initial gentle persuasion to more intense verbal pressure in WeChat groups or face to face, to calling the mayor’s hotline to report illegal operations of residents who had not signed the contract. However, in a way similar to the logic of precise action, residents would also select the targets for action, choosing those who had no actual residence difficulties and hoped to gain more interests by dilatory tactics, rather than those who had many children and a poor economic status and would have nowhere to live after the demolition. Although the latter would also cause the contracted households in the building to lose some awards, the society understood this. Therefore, by applying the benefit-binding mechanism but making concessions on the contract-signing rate, the grassroots government not only introduced social pressure, but also controlled the pressure to a certain extent.

Thus, I have discussed the three levels of rule hardening in practice: from setting external constraint conditions at first, to the regular construction of concessions in the medium term, and finally to applying administrative pressure above the bottom line. T Project called forth different groups and resources at different stages to dilute the constraints created by the rule hardening, so that power still had the potential for expansion and retreat in a seemingly open and transparent “formalization” operation. The subtlety and moderation of the government in exercising power in the new stage can be observed.

Conclusions and discussion

After the successful operation of T Project, this model was quickly promoted in City P. In 2017, W Project was launched in D district, which was only a few steps away from T Project. It had the same geographical particularity, but the household structure and architectural forms were more complex, with a larger scale (5589 households in total, divided into 18 branch headquarters). Benefiting from the experience of T Project, W Project reached a 98% contract signing rate in less than one year from the establishment of the project department to the end of the contract-signing period. In addition, some projects that were left unfinished and stagnant under the original model were gradually restarted using the new model, which yielded more positive results. It is thus clear that the exploration made by T Project effectively coped with the current dilemmas posed by urbanization and solved the paradox in terms of the need for rule hardening, showing a strong demonstration effect.

The most important difference between T Project and the previous transformation experience is that the flexibility to promote project implementation was produced in the “formal operation” that emphasized institutional rigidity. Therefore, whether relieving or exerting pressure, it was premised on certain rules, procedures and organizations. In other words, the use of power in T Project was always cautious, meticulous, flexible and gentle. However, the reduction of such force does not mean the shrinkage of governance capabilities and resources. On the contrary, T Project’s exploration of a method of reshaping rigid rules in the most chaotic field of demolition was based on the extremely powerful executive capabilities of the grassroots government. Specifically, due to the shrinkage of room for negotiation caused by rigidity of the compensation standard, in order to facilitate negotiation the government had to mobilize a great many resources that had not existed under the original model. For example, the rules for interest binding changed demolition from being an issue for each household to a public affair in the neighborhood and mobilized extensive resources in the society; the government as the subject of work mobilized considerable administrative resources in the bureaucratic system (indemnificatory housing system, law enforcement power, coordination among departments); in further exploring the specific executor, we find that personal traits (personality, temperament, experiences, identity and social relations) as well as the emotional foundations between officials and residents were integrated into the policy execution process and enriched the resources for governance (YQ Shi, 2017; Zhang and Li, 2012). Therefore, T Project not only demonstrates the progress of the institution from rigidity to releasing flexibility layer by layer in a controlled manner, but also displays the process of continuous involvement of governance resources and continuous construction of governance capabilities, making it no longer a mere project of relocation, but rather a government project that sees through the logic of power, which is quite different from the previous development model.

This formalized construction of the room for power operation is very different from what was observed before. Represented by the informal operation of formal power, in discussing power flexibility in practice, the previous studies have put much emphasis on the non-systematic and informal factors of it and took them as the link points for the state to reach the society. Such factors still exist in this case, embodied especially in the personal working skills of grassroots cadres, but the most prominent characteristic in this case is that plenty of room of flexibility for power operation was constructed through institutional and organizational methods to cope with the ability to access the formal part at the power tip in a maturing society. Such a formal operation constitutes the important content of institutional innovation in a pilot project by local government. Compared with “informal operation”, the target for power space production of formal operation changed from a personal and low-end, arbitrary and informal method in the bureaucratic system to an organized and a higher, procedurally correct and more formal method in the bureaucratic system. The latter takes a more covert form and can be more easily integrated into the strategy toolkit of state governance, then be promoted and duplicated, showing the extremely self-renewing ability of the governance system in China. It should be pointed out that formal operation is not a substitute for informal operation, but a supplement to its front-end mechanism. The three levels of rule hardening discussed in this article are just a preliminary description without covering all the mechanisms; for example, how it is embedded into the state governance system and what kind of profound connection it has between the intensive administrative mobilizations. Thus, further analysis and studies are required.

In addition, from the other side of governance, this formalized construction of power space also brings a paradox which is worth considering to the issue of “production of society”: from this case, we can see that although the government emphasized transparency, openness and policy rigidity, and the arbitrariness and opacity of power seemed to have become less, from the perspective of social participation, social expression independent of the will of the state still seemed to be out of the question. For example, the setting of the contract signing rate to some extent squeezed residents’ autonomy in deciding whether to move or not. ²¹ In other words, the part of society that was independent of the will of the state did not seem to develop its expressive ability due to the standardization and formalization of procedures; on the contrary, it was dismantled precisely by the formalization and standardization of procedures. Is this kind of legalization and standardization an end or a means? Is it an attempt to reproduce the room for power operations in a formalized way, like the rule hardening revealed in this article?

Furthermore, if this case is examined in the context of history and the model of the previous stage, the process of mutual shaping between the state and the society can be roughly seen as an acting force and a counter-acting force. Such formalized, temperate and inward forms of power can be regarded as a response to the social protests at the early stage, and its final goal is to construct the room for power operation in a form which is more covert and farther apart from the society, so that it cannot be borrowed by intelligent social members. In this case, it is hidden within its own organizational behaviors. This is the tricky point of the operation of power. In this regard, it can also enable researchers to investigate governance beyond the range of the government and observe its dynamic historical process of mutual construction with the external environment.