Subcounty administration in rural southwest China (1950-2000): changing state spatiality, persistent village territoriality and implications for the current urban transformation

ABSTRACT This article is a historical ethnography of how village communities in southwest China had maintained a certain amount of autonomy amid the expanding state spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Shortly after the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, the party-state built up three successive subcounty administrative systems – the district-township system, the people’s commune system, and the current township system – to expand its institutional terrains in the rural areas. Meanwhile, village communities under the jurisdiction of these penetrating administrative structures strove to maintain their social and physical boundaries through a series of traditional mechanisms. The interaction between the state’s attempts to establish a socialist order and villages’ tenacity to maintain their special territorial status resulted in a three-layered land rural land ownership, under which villages were able to maintain a certain degree of extraterritoriality. Such a situation has made the state territorial control in rural areas incomplete and porous.