Urbanization is a conflict-prone process, especially on the question of land—who gets to use and profit from it has been the cause of political mobilization across the world. Chinese urbanization presents a puzzle: it has produced pell-mell urbanization accompanied by widespread grievances over dispossession and displacement, but the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party remains intact. Existing theories on the politics of urbanization, this project argues, cannot be stretched enough to explain the Chinese case. Built largely from the experience of liberal democracies, they overlook a defining feature of China’s post-Mao urban development: the communist revolution established an encompassing bureaucratic infrastructure, backed by Party hierarchy, that incorporated the entire society into the Party-state—especially landholding rural communities organized through collectivization. Despite China’s partial liberalization after 1978, this collectivization was never fully dismantled. Consequently, how China balances urban growth with political stability follows its own logic. The central inquiry of this project is thus a constitutive one: what is Chinese urbanization a case of?

Empirically, the project compares the evolution of rural governance and collective economies in Shenzhen and Shanghai from the beginning of Reform and Opening-Up through Xi-era Collective Property Rights Reform (CPRR). As two of China’s most strategic cities in the first two decades of reform, Shenzhen and Shanghai present a revealing contrast. Shenzhen was built almost from scratch to pioneer market-oriented and capitalist policies, while Shanghai, long the bastion of state-led industrialization, adopted reforms more cautiously and in measured steps. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival materials, I show how urban development in the two cities produced a patchwork of state–village relations: some villages enjoyed substantial autonomy, while others remained deeply dependent on state-provided development. Both configurations helped contain conflict when rural land became an object of intense local-state demand, but both were unsettled by Xi-era CPRR, which sought to curb land-grabbing and enhance regime legitimacy by strengthening villagers’ claims to collective assets.

I derive the concept of party-state urbanism to characterize the essence of Chinese urbanization. Party-state urbanism rests on three interlinked mechanisms: (1) calibrated central-local coupling, (2) institutionalized local variation, and (3) persistent state incorporation of landholding communities. The central authority alternates between loosening and tightening its grip on local governments, granting discretion when growth requires experimentation and reasserting discipline when local extraction generates political risk. This produces heterogeneity by design—not only across cities, but also across villages within the same city—creating the patchwork of state-village relations. At the same time, the socialist legacies have kept peasants and village elites embedded within the state apparatus—this arrangement makes villages vulnerable to extraction, co-optation, and punishment internal to the bureaucratic system, but it also necessitates a baseline of protection of peasant interests. As a result of three interlinked mechanisms, land conflict rarely scales into a translocal political challenge, allowing the Chinese party-state to sustain rapid urbanization without losing political control.