When Grid Meets Web: How COVID-19 Extended the Party-State's Capacity for Social Control at the Grassroots.

Although Xi Jinping is widely seen, both inside and outside of China, as a vigorous centralizer of political power, the party-state responded to the sudden emergence of COVID-19 with an arguably less visible but dramatic shift in the opposite direction: a sudden delegation of power and authority to lower-level organizations in order to maintain social governance and control at the grassroots. This unprecedented rapid downshift of authority greatly empowered the urban subdistricts (街道) and neighborhood organizations (社区) that operate just outside the margins of official state power. Such a downward shift to the margins was supercharged by a rapid buildup of the high-tech capacities of the urban grassroots that included a proliferation of digital instruments to control and restrain the movement of ordinary residents on a grand scale, resulting, during the period of the pandemic, in the strictest social control since the Maoist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]