Paper short abstract:

Portrayals of China's municipal governments as entrepreneurial actors ignore the role they play in public goods provisioning. Drawing on ethnographic work in Chengdu, this paper adopts a moral economy approach to understand how community leaders came to "publicize" two goods.

Paper long abstract:

Municipal leaders in neosocialist China are often characterized as entrepreneurial actors engaged primarily in paving the way for capital accumulation through real estate development. But this portrayal ignores the expanding role that local governments play in public goods provisioning—a role reflected in recent urban governance strategies focused on community-building and creating a "service-oriented" government. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in suburban Chengdu, this paper adopts a moral economy approach to understand how community leaders came to shoulder responsibility for partly "publicizing" two goods: residential parking and vegetable markets. Since urbanization, community leaders have relocated the open-air vegetable market three times, and, in a move echoing Mao-era subsidized food pricing, are working with the city to build an inexpensive market. By contrast, the parking issue has no socialist roots. When the area was urbanized in 2004, developers planned for less than one automobile per household; today most households have at least one car. These two "boundary goods"—goods that straddle the border between public and private provisioning—illustrate the web of entitlements and responsibilities that Thompson saw as the basis of the moral economy.  Understanding community-level leaders as being embedded in moral frameworks established by government directives on the one hand, and middle-class residents' demands on the other, offers the potential to reinvigorate our theorization of the local state in China.