Administrative reclassification and neighborhood governance in urbanizing China

Before the economic reforms, the Chinese state relied on mutually exclusive hierarchies within and between rural and urban governance at the subnational level to structure administration, organize populations, and exert political authority. Other than spatial restructuring and population transformation, urbanization in China also involves rural-to-urban administrative reclassification of territories. Drawing on a 2018 national survey conducted in 40 townships, this article addresses how administrative reclassification has produced transitional neighborhoods with varied modes of governance and distinctive patterns of help-seeking among residents. The empirical data indicate that, even after completion of the rural-to-urban administrative reclassification at the township or county level, many rural villages have not been well incorporated into the urban administrative system. Although the number of reported neighborhood problems increased, respondents residing in reclassified areas were less willing to seek help from the villagers’ or residents’ committees than those residing in locations that faced no administrative change. Some residents turned to property management whereas others attempted to bring the issues directly to higher levels of local government. Viewed through the territorial logic that has long characterized local governance in China, the research raises questions about the impact of administrative reclassification on neighborhood governance as urbanization continues.


Introduction
China's high-speed urbanization has been driven by two related but independent trends: first by the migration of more than 200 million villagers to the cities and, equally important, by the reclassification of rural areas as urban space (Chen et al., 2015). Specifically, by converting counties to urban districts, rural townships to towns, towns to street districts, and villages to urban neighborhoods, the government has administratively re-defined 200 million former rural residents as urbanites without any of them changing the actual location of their homes (Cartier, 2015;Chen, Zinda, et al., 2017). This process of territorial urbanization by administrative fiat has not only redrawn geographic boundaries but also impacts neighborhood governance.
Historically, China has had four layers of local government: provinces, prefectures, counties, and townships (or five, if neighborhoods and villages are included) and distinguishes between urban and rural units (Cartier, 2015;Landry, 2008). In urban areas, prefectural-level units such as municipal cities are divided into urban districts (qu) at the county level that are in turn subdivided into streets (jiedao) and towns (zhen) at the township level, and further into communities (shequ) at the neighborhood level. In rural areas, counties (xian) are divided into rural townships (xiang) at the township level that are further subdivided into villages (cun) at the grassroots level.
Before the economic reforms in China, the state relied on mutually exclusive hierarchies within and between rural and urban governance at the subnational level to structure administration, organize populations, and exert political authority (Read, 2012;Tsai, 2007). However, following the rapid expansion of administratively defined urban space, the administrative status of grassroots units often does not neatly align with that of the supervising authority. Nor does administrative status align with de facto changes in land use. The photograph in Fig. 1 depicts a case in point: the reclassification of previously rural land allowed for the construction of high-density multi-story residences and the replacement of a township-level administration with an urban street office. However, the neighborhood remains classified as a village.
Because of such anomalies, there can be confusion over providing and accessing urban services. Fig. 2, for example, shows that the administrative unit responsible for road cleaning is a villagers' committee, but that committee is supervised by an urban street office, and simultaneously the town government issued the bulletin board.
Aside from reshuffling power and territorial relations between administrative levels, reclassification has complicated governance within neighborhoods. In Chinese villages in rural areas, selfgovernment is realized through the election of local representatives for the villagers' committee (VC, cunweihui) that reports upward to township officials. The VC in villages reclassified as urban communities has been replaced by a residents' committee (RC, juweihui) that is nested within an administrative hierarchy reaching to city officials via street offices. However, RCs in many of these newly urbanized villages have struggled to establish their authority. Residents continue to turn to rural cadres for help and the VC retains its role in collective asset management while the urban RC tries to handle administrative tasks (Kan, 2019a;Yep & Wu, 2020).
The existing literature argues that territorial urbanization is a process of state-building that should strengthen state control over grassroots neighborhoods, establish political legitimacy, and mitigate potential social unrest (Cartier, 2015;Heberer & Göbel, 2011;Liu, 2006;Wong, 2015). In practice, however, the deployment of administrativeterritorial strategies is equally likely to produce hybrid or interim modes of governance that face difficulties in obtaining authority and commanding compliance from residents (Tang, 2015;Yep & Forrest, 2016).
This article is based on a 2018 survey undertaken in 40 townships undergoing various forms of administrative reclassification to investigate the lived reality of neighborhood governance in newly-classified localities. This research makes a timely contribution to academic and policy discussions of urbanization, rural-to-urban transition, and grassroots governance both in China and the developing world. As urbanization continues and more areas of the developing world experience rapid and unplanned growth (Cheru, 2005;Lerner et al., 2014;United Nations, 2015), this research also contributes to comparative analysis of polities facing similar transitions and challenges (Fanchette, 2017).
The next two sections describe the configurations of Chinese grassroots administrative units and an assessment of how variations in the type of reclassification create distinctive dynamics and challenges in neighborhood governance.

Changing configurations of grassroots governance in China
Since imperial times, Chinese rulers have relied on systems of territorial governance whereby every neighborhood occupies the bottom rung within a nested hierarchy of administrative units and whose residents depend on the initiative of local officials or elites to access the next level of government authority (Fitzgerald, 2021;Ren, 2020). Over the centuries, the configuration of administrative hierarchies and dependency on local officials has varied, but the operative first principle remains territorial and hierarchical.
After 1949, following a policy to restrain the growth of urban territory and urban populations, the government created mutually exclusive hierarchies within and between rural and urban governance at the subnational level. In urban areas, a nested system of local governance subdivided areas of cities into districts, districts into streets, and streets into neighborhoods. In terms of governance, the official reach of the state stopped at the level of the street. Professional civil servants staffed district governments and street offices. At the neighborhood level, volunteers, usually recent retirees, staffed the RCs (Chen, 2009;Heberer & Göbel, 2011;Read, 2012). In rural areas, where until the mid-1990s most citizens lived, the key unit below the county was the people's commune. Communes were further divided into production brigades, and brigades into teams. Since the demise of the commune system in 1983, townships constituted the lowest tier in China's rural administrative hierarchy. Townships were in turn subdivided into administrative villages that could be further divided into several smaller settlements known as natural villages (ziran cun) (Kelliher, 1997;O'Brien & Li, 2000;Tsai, 2007).
As urbanization accelerated in the 1990s accompanying the reforms, the government changed the structures of grassroots governance in both rural and urban areas to promote "self-governance" (zizhi) (Benewick, Tong, & Howell, 2004;Smith, 2019). In urban areas, the population was divided among residentially defined "communities" (shequ) (Heberer & Göbel, 2011). Newly established RCs, in cooperation with nongovernmental organizations and social service agencies, assumed the welfare functions previously performed by work units (danwei). This transition eased the state's financial burden while maintaining political control (Chen, 2009;Yan & Gao, 2005). In rural areas, VCs were termed autonomous mass organizations, and representatives were elected directly by village members to establish a more invested and responsive leadership that would assist the state in enforcing policies in rural areas (Kelliher, 1997;O'Brien & Li, 2000).
Explosive economic growth and a state-led program of rapid urbanization since the late 1990s, however, have vastly complicated the dichotomous distinction between grassroots governance in both urban and rural areas (Ma, 2005). To support the growth of cities, municipal governments were given jurisdictional powers over surrounding rural counties and county-level cities. Between 1999 and 2018, the number of counties decreased from 1510 to 1335 while the number of urban districts increased from 749 to 970 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2020). Urban governments were also given powers to expand territorially through the establishment of new towns and districts. In a project undertaken by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2013, 145 of the 156 prefectural cities investigated and 67 of the 161 county-level cities investigated were granted approval to develop sites for "new towns and new districts" (xincheng xinqu). Among the prefectural cities, the average planned area of 63.6 km 2 matched or exceeded the area of half of all current municipalities (Li & Fan, 2013).
The extended administrative reach of cities enables municipal governments to exercise ownership and authority over larger areas. This has facilitated the sale of land for urban development to finance municipal budgets and fostered urban sprawl (Hsing, 2010;Ong, 2014). By 2018, the area of urban construction land had increased more than eight times since 1981 (Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China, 2019).

How administrative reclassification impacts neighborhood governance
Administrative reclassification has also taken place at the township level, involving the conversion of rural townships and towns to urban streets. Between 1999 and 2018, the number of rural townships fell from 24,745 to 10,253 while the number of streets jumped from 5904 to 8393 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2020). Reclassification at both the county and township levels entailed changes in governance structures: the county government was replaced by an urban district government, and the township government was replaced by a street office. In addition to direct conversions, other changes included transferring counties or townships from the jurisdiction of one city to another, and territorial mergers that incorporated smaller localities into larger administrative areas or higher-ranked units (Cartier, 2015;Ma, 2005). The affected localities experienced either rescaling via a change from one level of government to another or were placed under new jurisdictional authorities (Kan & Chen, 2021;Liu, 2006;Wang & Yeh, 2020). Reclassification also occurred at the neighborhood level, where administrative villages were abolished and replaced by urban communities (checun jianju). The conversion similarly entailed a change in governance structures in which the VCs were replaced by RCs. Between 1999 and 2018, the number of VCs fell from 801,483 to 542,019, while In peri-urban areas, where urban districts and streets had replaced rural counties and townships since the 1980s and 1990s, reclassification took place rapidly at the neighborhood level as the dismantlement of villages made way for the establishment of new urban communities. In these areas, reclassification often accompanied extensive land expropriation and wholesale redevelopment, where land belonging to urban villages was requisitioned by the state for urban real estate development (Hsing, 2010). Former villagers were moved into high-rise apartments, freeing up land for lucrative commercial or residential use. Residents were offered urban hukou, resettlement housing, and compensation in the form of cash payment, property, and shares in collective assets (Kan, 2016).
The same strategy of consolidating land through moving peasants into high-rises has become increasingly deployed in the more rural parts of the country. The Rural Community Building policy, implemented as part of the Building a New Socialist Countryside campaign, has promoted rural urbanization and village renovation since the early 2000s (Ahlers, 2015;Meyer-Clement, 2019). Community building that involved the large-scale construction of new residential complexes to house relocated villagers, has been used by local governments to gain control over rural land, attract investment, and promote modernization in the countryside. In these areas, spatial restructuring often preceded administrative conversion at the neighborhood level. The counties and townships have been reclassified as urban units-districts, development zones, streets, or towns-but the neighborhood remains a village (as shown in Fig. 1). A form of "interim" administration functions in these neighborhoods that is expected to gradually transition from village selfgovernance to a more concentrated and monitored form of urban governance (Ahlers, 2015).
Regardless of whether reclassification has taken place at the neighborhood or higher level, the impact of administrative restructuring on governance is not uniform: the complexity of administrative restructuring together with shortages of social services have aggravated neighborhood tensions in the transitioning localities. As Tang (2015) notes, rural-to-urban transition and the associated relocation and resettlement of former villagers have resulted in various civil disputes, quarrels over communal space, and complaints about the lack of security (Li et al., 2016;Wang et al., 2017;Zhang et al., 2018).
Precisely when neighborhood problems increase, however, reclassification has complicated the lines of authority and responsibilities. First, institutional transition at the neighborhood level remains incomplete. In the new communities that replaced abolished villages, RCs were supposed to take over governance functions from the VCs. However, the transfer of authority has often been incomplete and urbanized villagers still turn to former rural cadres and village officials for help, despite attempts to co-opt these village leaders into the newly formed RCs (Tang, 2015;Yep & Wu, 2020). One primary reason for this relates to the need to manage rural collective resources. Many rural residents retain rights over collectively-owned land and property managed by VCs or rural shareholding companies set up to operate collective assets (Kan, 2019a). Income derived from collective property-distributed to villagers in the form of dividend payouts-constitutes a continuing and significant stream of household income for urbanized rural residents; consequently, village leaders who manage these assets as company directors retain considerable power and influence in the new urban communities (Kan, 2019b). In many cases, the old VCs and new RCs coexist as parallel governance structures, producing fragmentation of authority. The RCs, funded by town or street governments, are supposed to be popularly elected and responsible for administrative tasks but may have little rapport with their constituents. The VCs, which have direct relevance for those villagers with a stake in collective assets, do not represent all residents in the new community, which may comprise relocated residents from several dismantled villages. As Yep & Wu, 2020 point out, residents' attachment to former village institutions can prevent the formation of a new community identity, thus undermining the effectiveness of new governance structures.
Reclassification also means that grassroots institutions must now work with new authorities and deal with new tasks. Following the incorporation of villages into urban areas, grassroots leaders must cooperate more closely with upper-level administrative units such as town governments or street offices. These new authorities directly appoint Party secretaries and heads of newly formed communities; they also assign a plethora of new tasks to grassroots leaders. Both VCs and RCs are required to concentrate on public goods provision, and to operate a range of new services from establishing reading and computer rooms to overseeing garbage disposal and cleaning (as shown in Fig. 2) (Meyer-Clement, 2019). In localities populated by many migrants, VCs and RCs are also responsible for administrative affairs for the migrant population (Liu et al., 2010).
The realignment of spatial order in urbanized communities further creates new challenges for governance. In a traditional village, public accountability is ensured not only by formal institutions and voting processes but also by a sense of reciprocity based on kinship and friendship (Tsai, 2007). Rural cadres play a key role in monitoring and mediating disputes before they escalate into large-scale conflicts, and such intervention is possible due to the proximity and personal relationships between members of the VCs and villagers (Tang, 2015). The rehousing of villagers into high-rises changes the spatial setting of interactions, which directly affects residents' encounters with state authority in their everyday lives (Yep & Forrest, 2016). Thus, just when the frequency of neighborhood problems and conflicts increases, governing capacity and social cohesion decline (Zhu, Breitung, & Li, 2012).
Based on the available evidence, the authors hypothesized that more neighborhood problems would be reported in localities undergoing rural-to-urban administrative reclassification than in locations experiencing no change. They further asked: Where do residents seek help in resolving neighborhood problems? How do they view their relationship with the VC and RC? And does help-seeking vary across localities? In the following sections, these questions are addressed empirically.

The 2018 Urbanization and Quality of Life Survey
In 2018 the authors designed and implemented the Urbanization and Quality of Life Survey that targeted residents of 40 township-level administrative units as primary sampling units (PSUs), including 32 street districts and towns that experienced administrative reclassification after 2000 and eight towns and rural townships that were considered potential sites of urbanization. The 40 PSUs spread over 17 provinces (12 in eastern China and five in western China), 37 prefectures, and 40 county-level administrative units. Advantage was taken of the implementation of the National New Urbanization 1 The number of RCs first decreased between 1999 and 2003 because smaller residential neighborhoods were merged into larger communities (shequ) following publication of the Ministry of Civil Affairs' Opinions on Promoting Community Building in Urban China in 2000. The urban community-building process took different forms depending on the locality. In general, the newlyestablished RCs became responsible for larger areas than the earlier RCs (Chen, 2009;Heberer & Göbel, 2011).
Comprehensive Pilot Program in 2014 when selecting the sampling sites (National Development and Reform Commission of China, 2014). 2 Half of the PSUs were drawn from the list of townships in the 2014 Pilot Program. The other half were selected from non-pilot areas using the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) technique (Iacus, King, & Porro, 2011).
Once these two sets of cases were carefully constructed, a detailed geographical information system (GIS) within each PSU aggregating information at the arc-minute level was developed to create spatial sample frames of physical areas (Landry & Shen, 2005). Four secondary sampling units (SSUs) that were half square minutes of latitude and longitude (approximately the size of a rural village or an urban neighborhood) were randomly selected in each PSU, but because one PSU comprised three SSUs only, a total of 159 SSUs were sampled for the household survey.
The distribution of the PSUs and the SSUs between the categories of administrative reclassification is reported in Table 1. Although diverse forms of administrative reclassification took place at the township and county levels, a large proportion of rural villages had not been administratively converted to urban neighborhoods.
Within each SSU, 100 small "spatial blocks" (80 m × 80 m) were further enumerated, among which tertiary sampling units (TSUs) were selected taking account of population density and the required sample size. The target population of the household survey was adults between 18 and 75 years old, regardless of their hukou status, who had been residing in the townships for more than six months and in the selected household for at least 30 days. To achieve a confidence level of 95% and an absolute sampling error no greater than 5%, a minimum valid sample of 3200 respondents to ensure the appropriate estimation of population parameters was necessary. All households within the small "spatial blocks" were enumerated and a total of 5024 households were randomly sampled. Of these 4949 were valid, i.e., including members eligible for the survey. Within each valid household, one eligible respondent was selected using the Kish grid-a pre-assigned table of random numbers commonly used in survey research to determine which person in a household to interview (Landry & Shen, 2005).
The survey fieldwork was completed between April and June 2018, through face-to-face interviews using the computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) system. Ethics approval for the study was given by the authors' employing institute. To ensure quality control, the fieldwork supervisors checked the quality of each completed questionnaire on-site during data collection. The CAPI and its web support system allowed fieldwork supervisors and research staff to monitor the progress of fieldwork, check for sample bias, and assess data quality simultaneously. Any abnormal patterns or problems were immediately followed up. After completing the fieldwork, the research team conducted another round of thorough checks via audio recordings and phone calls and excluded 69 questionnaires that were either inadequately or improperly completed.
After data checking and cleaning, the final valid sample size was 3229 (response rate 65.2%). The average length of the completed interviews was 51.6 min. Post-stratification weights were generated to adjust the individuals in the study sample to represent the general population in the 40 townships according to the 2010 China Township Population Census Data on such key variables as gender and migration status (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2012).
Table 2 includes descriptions of individual-level measures used in the analysis and descriptive statistics of the survey respondents. Of note is that in the reclassified urban areas or localities identified as potential sites of urbanization, a large majority of the respondents (about 84%) still held rural hukou; only 7% held traditional urban hukou and 9% had converted to the newly created non-rural resident (or jumin) hukou.

Measures
Residents' assessment of neighborhood governance was measured in terms of three issues: the existence of problems in residential neighborhoods; where residents sought help in resolving these problems; and how they assessed the relationship between residents and VC or RC. Descriptive statistics of the coded variables are reported in Table 3.
The respondents were first asked whether their neighborhood had the following nine problems: (1) noisy atmosphere for example from transportation or construction; (2) noisy neighbors or parties; (3) objects being thrown from a height; (4) graffiti; (5) trash and litter; (6) crime; (7) random construction projects; (8) random parking; and (9) unauthorized street vendors. Based on the answers, a count variable, ranging from 0 to 9, was created. Overall, a mean of problems reported was 1.8.
Respondents were then asked who they would first approach if they encountered the problems enumerated. Nearly three-quarters replied they would go to the VC or RC, 5% would seek help from the property management and another 5% from local governments directly. Three dichotomous variables were created: those who chose the VC or RC, the property management, and local governments were coded as 1, respectively, and the rest 0.
Respondents were further asked to assess the relationship between the residents and the VC or RC on a scale of 1 (very harmonious) to 4 (very unharmonious). Those who chose "very unharmonious" (2.36%) were coded 1 and the others 0.

Analytical strategies
A three-level mixed-effects model with random intercepts was specified, allowing each PSU to have its own intercept and each SSU to have its own intercept relative to the PSU within which it was nested. The three-level data structure is defined as follows: i = 1, …, n jk levelone units (individuals) nested within j = 1, …, n k level-two units (SSUs) in turn nested within k = 1, …, n level-three units (PSUs). The mixed-effects model with random intercepts at both level two and level three is represented below: In the equation, y ijk represents the assessment of neighborhood governance by individual i in neighborhood j and township k. The covariate vector x ijk includes potential explanatory variables at all three levels, and β is the corresponding vector of regression coefficients. γ k represents the level-three random intercept of townships; μ jk indicates the level-two random intercept of neighborhoods; and ε ijk presents the level-one individual disturbance.
The dependent variables are neighborhood problems; sources of help-seeking for neighborhood problems-VC or RC, property management, or local governments; and assessment of the relationship 2 Sixty-two cities and towns and all of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces were selected as the pilot areas in 2014, covering 521 county-level administrative units and 7618 township-level administrative units across China. The Pilot Program did not specify a mandatory policy agenda. The participating sites were encouraged to be innovative in promoting people-oriented urbanization and initiate hukou, land, finance, and administrative reforms that suited their local circumstances and conditions. between residents and the VC/RC. The negative binomial regression for neighborhood problems-a count variable with overdispersion, and the logistic regression for seeking help from the VC/RC, property management, or local governments, and the relationship between residents and the VC/RC which are all dichotomously coded, were estimated.
The five categories of administrative reclassification at the township level (level three) and the four categories of administrative status at the neighborhood level (level two) were included as covariates, controlling whether the sampled townships were in localities participating in the 2014 National New Urbanization Comprehensive Pilot Program to account for the sampling design effect. Individual-level (level-one) variables, including age, gender, marital status, education, occupation, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership, household wealth, homeownership, hukou status, and migration status, were also added as controls. Table 4 reports the regression results from the three-level mixedeffects models. Based on the evidence in existing literature, it was hypothesized that more neighborhood problems would be reported in localities undergoing rural-to-urban administrative reclassification than in those not reclassified. Overall, the regression results of Model 1 confirm the hypothesis. Respondents residing in towns or rural townships converted to street districts reported the highest number of neighborhood problems, followed by respondents residing in townships incorporated into development zones. Though not statistically significant, the coefficients on towns or rural townships incorporated into urban districts and rural townships converted to towns were also positive compared to towns with no reclassification.

Regression results
At the neighborhood level, according to Model 1, respondents residing in urban neighborhoods converted from rural villages reported the largest number of neighborhood problems. No significant differences were found among rural villages with no reclassification, urban neighborhoods with no change, and newly established urban neighborhoods. The comparison of the coefficients on township-and neighborhood-level administrative reclassifications is further illustrated in Fig. 3.
Where did residents seek help in resolving these neighborhood problems? The regression results of Model 2 indicate that respondents residing in townships experiencing any forms of administrative reclassification were significantly less likely to seek help from the VC/RC than those residing in locations that were not reclassified. Moreover, according to Model 4, those residing in townships converted to street districts or incorporated into urban districts were significantly more likely to bring the issue to local governments directly.
At the neighborhood level, as shown in Model 2, respondents residing in urban neighborhoods with no change were more likely to seek help from the VC/RC than those residing in rural villages not reclassified. However, respondents residing in newly established urban neighborhoods or rural villages converted to urban neighborhoods were less likely to go to the VC/RC according to Model 2 but were more likely to seek help from the property management according to Model 3.
As for respondents' assessment of the relationship between residents    and the VC/RC, the results of Model 5 show that respondents residing in towns or rural townships converted to streets or incorporated into development zones were the most likely to report the relationship as very unharmonious. At the neighborhood level, no significant differences in respondents' assessment of the relationship between residents and the VC/RC were discernible across the four categories of administrative reclassification. Fig. 4 further illustrates the comparison of the coefficients from the logistic regression according to the township

Discussion and conclusion
While extant research on China's rural-to-urban transition at the neighborhood level is primarily based on case studies, this study draws on a national survey of 3229 individuals living in 40 townships and 159 neighborhoods. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study based on a national sample of selected localities undergoing various forms of rural-to-urban administrative reclassification. This section discusses the major findings based on the three-level mixed-effects regression analysis and reflects on their implications for urbanization and grassroots governance in China and beyond.

Neighborhood governance in urbanizing China: challenges and concerns
For many decades, the administrative hierarchies for governing rural and urban China were distinct. Rapid urbanization through administrative reclassification and recent campaigns such as rural community building and the National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020), however, reshuffled territorial relations and reconfigured grassroots governance structures, producing straddled modes of governance that were "interim" and transitional (Ahlers, 2015;Meyer-Clement, 2019;Tang, 2015).
This multi-sited, national survey generated several key findings. Firstly, consistent with the research hypothesis, more neighborhood problems were reported in localities undergoing administrative reclassification than in those that were not reclassified. In particular, respondents residing in streets converted from towns or rural townships reported the highest number of neighborhood problems, followed by those residing in towns or rural townships incorporated into development zones. At the neighborhood level, respondents residing in urban communities converted from rural villages reported the highest number of neighborhood problems. Secondly, despite the higher number of neighborhood problems reported, respondents residing in reclassified areas were less willing to seek help from neighborhood organizations such as the VC and RC than those residing in locations experiencing no administrative change. A similar pattern can be observed at the neighborhood level; compared with residents of neighborhoods that did not experience restructuring, respondents from urban neighborhoods that were newly established or converted from rural villages were less likely to contact the VC or RC to resolve disputes, but more likely to approach property management. Moreover, respondents residing in towns or rural townships converted to streets or incorporated into development zones reported the poorest relationship between residents and the VC or RC.
These results are consistent with previous research findings that neighborhoods undergoing rural-to-urban transition encounter greater problems and challenges. Scholars have attributed this both to incomplete institutional transition and to the erosion of traditional bonds between residents and the marginalization of previous grassroots leaders (Deng, 2018;Tang, 2015;Yep & Forrest, 2016). The study findings confirm these concerns; residents in newly established or reclassified urban neighborhoods were more reluctant to seek help from the VC or RC. However, the weakening role of conventional neighborhood governance structures does not necessarily lead to greater instability. A large majority of respondents in this study indicated that the relationship between residents and the VC or RC was harmonious, although poorer assessments were found in townships converted to streets or incorporated into development zones. The survey further shows how new agencies such as property management and social service providers have filled the gap. Future research should further explore the role played by new actors in neighborhood governance, from property management and shareholding corporations to non-profits and social work organizations (Chen, 2009;Davis, 2006;Kan, 2016;Meyer-Clement, 2019). To deepen its reach into urbanizing areas, the Chinese government has consolidated its presence through recruiting and coopting non-state and quasi-state actors in grassroots governance (Kan & Ku, 2021). Recently, a representative of the National People's Congress proposed that property management companies should be incorporated into the urban governance system to compensate for the manpower shortage (ifeng.com, 2020). The implementation of such policies will have important implications for state-society relations and the nature of community self-governance at the neighborhood level.
The research findings also highlight how challenges in neighborhood governance extend beyond the grassroots level. Upgrading rural townships and towns to streets or incorporating townships into urban districts or development zones often involves the merger of several townships or villages, expanding the jurisdictional powers of township and district governments, and granting them greater control over land consolidation, population relocation, and infrastructure construction (Cartier, 2015;Liu, 2006;Wang & Yeh, 2020). Expansion of the boundaries and powers of higher-level authorities does not necessarily bring about more efficient governance (Ahlers, 2015). Some of the reported neighborhood problems may have been caused by projects implemented by higher levels of government, such as noise from construction. When residents in reclassified areas bring their issues directly to local governments, it will put more pressure on the already strained local state capacities (Deng, 2018;Tang, 2015). Yet, the need to coordinate between different administrative levels creates new challenges. "Joint community governance", a process in which various levels of local government-district, street, and neighborhood-pool resources and work together to address residents' needs, has been advocated as an important model for urban governance in Shanghai and has worked well in dealing with emergencies or urgent issues and conflicts. Going forward, how to maintain joint community governance through sustainable institutional arrangements should be further explored (Peng & Xiong, 2021).

Implications for continuing urbanization in China and beyond
Scholarship on the new politics of community suggests that communities in modern society can no longer be seen as "naturally occurring, apolitical spaces to which one retreats to escape the pressures of modern life"; rather, "communities of all sorts [including place-based neighborhoods] now constitute sites of political engagement and contestation … around which diverse social practices occur" (Collins, 2010, p.7). The concept of the neighborhood community is reframed as a new venue for latent but constant contestations of power, resistance, and social inequality involving both endogenous and external forces (Dai, 2020).
In China, neighborhoods are the roots of the state within a multilevel territorial governance structure. As the government continues to endorse urbanization by administrative reclassification, and more townships and villages are incorporated into urban areas, residents who have rarely been consulted experience shifts in forms of governance as well as changes in their livelihoods and living environment (Jiang et al., 2018;Li et al., 2016;Zhang et al., 2018). In the past, local governments have focused on land conversion for profit and accelerated the spatial restructuring of the countryside (Ahlers, 2015;Lin, 2014;Meyer-Clement, 2019;Ong, 2014;Yep & Forrest, 2016). There is now increasingly vocal opposition to place-centered urbanization and demand for a more human-centered approach (Chen, Davis, et al., 2017;Wang et al., 2015). To progress in that direction, the government should actively explore ways to encourage public participation, strengthen grassroots governance, and facilitate the process of rural-to-urban transition (Guan et al., 2018;Li, Zhang, Hui, & Lang, 2020).
While urbanization across different parts of the developing world takes diverse trajectories and displays contextual specificities, one observation is common; urbanization and the consequent integration of formerly rural residents into urban society create enormous challenges for local governance (Guan et al., 2018;Liu & Zhang, 2020;Wang et al., 2015). While this study was conducted in China, it has relevant implications for other developing countries and regions experiencing similar changes. For instance, tensions arising from administrative restructuring and in-situ urbanization have also been observed in Vietnam (Fanchette, 2017). Studies have also shown how rapid and unplanned urban growth exacerbate inequalities and threaten sustainable development in other developing regions. Recently, China's strong economic presence in some developing countries has influenced their urbanization approach and methods of local governance (Cheru, 2005;Lerner et al., 2014;United Nations, 2015). As urban growth continues in the developing world, this study provides potential insights for comparative analysis of polities facing similar transitions and challenges. Future research based on comparative analysis is urgently needed to further enrich our understanding of urbanization processes both in China and elsewhere in the developing world.

Declaration of competing interest
None.