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This paper concerns the process of power at the periphery of state bureaucracy with a focus on township governments and their land development projects in the last two decades. I argue that townships at the bottom of the state bureaucracy operate like power brokers between the state and the village. When dealing with the formal party-state system above them, the township's delegated power is highly uncertain. Townships choose to maneuver in the unspecified legal and administrative zone to bypass the scrutiny of the supervising government. When it comes to the village below them, the township's power is under-defined, and therefore can be stretched to intensify and centralize the grips over village resources and land. In both cases, township officials strategize to maximize their control of village land and profit from the booming land-lease market in China's fast industrializing and urbanizing areas. Townships' land deals reflect the general power process of decentralization. Their brokerage of power corresponds directly with that of property rights in post-reform China. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

In this special issue, we have tried to bridge studies of the Chinese state and of the Chinese city by employing the concepts of space production and territoriality. Three sets of analytical tools frame our questions: First, we use the concept of "urbanization of the local state" instead of "state-led urbanization" to capture the active role of urban processes as a formative force in social transformation and a definitive element in the making of the local state. Urban construction has become the key mechanism of local state building in the areas of public finance, territorial power consolidation, and local leaders' political performance. Second, we expand the concept of the city to encompass the notion of territoriality, defined as spatial strategies to consolidate power in a given place and time and to secure autonomy. Territorial contestation is unusually intense when the premises of state authority are under-defined and local state jurisdictional boundaries shift frequently, as has been the case in China over the past thirty years. Third, we expand the analysis of territoriality from the realm of the state to that of society with the concept of "civic territoriality." This concept refers to societal actors' conscious cultivation and struggle to build territory for self protection and autonomy at the physical, socio-political, and discursive levels. Civic territoriality is central to societal actors' cultivation of collective identities, to their framing of grievances and demands, and to their options and choice of collective actions. This framework helped to organize the seven contributions of this issue into the following three themes: Territorial Order and State Power, Territorialization of Capital, and Civic Territoriality. Download PDF for full text of Introduction.