Creating Chinese Urbanism

Front matter

EE TO

‘The rapid redevelopment of Chinese cities, along with the vast expansion of geographic and social mobility, have almost completely erased the collectivist urban neighbourhoods typical of the Mao era. In this deeply researched book, Fulong Wu vividly documents the varieties of newly emergent urban communities and provides a conceptual framework for understanding a new and distinctive Chinese urbanism.’

Andrew G. Walder, author of China Under Mao

Contents

List of figures List of tables Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: leaving the soil 1 Changing residential landscape: a new urban social geography 2 The end of (neo-)traditionalism 3 Transient space with a new moral order 4 Residential enclosure without private governance 5 Rethinking urban China in an urban debate

Conclusion: a visible state emerging from urban revolution

References Index

Preface

Geography is a science subject in China. Students of Urban Planning in Geography in the 1980s had one thing in common: they did not take Geography or any humanities subject for their university entrance examination. Interested in physics, but for leisure reading, by chance I found a small book, Rural China, by Fei Xiaotong. Fei was an internationally renowned anthropologist and sociologist. At that time he was striving to re-establish Sociology in Chinese universities after its earlier abolition. But I did not know any of this. To me, the book, only about 100 pages in Chinese, is appealing because it provides a grand overview of the characteristics of Chinese society, offering synthetic narratives of complex social phenomena.

The 1980s, a liberal era in China, saw an intellectual renaissance. The discourse of Western market economics was introduced, though aggressive marketisation occurred a decade later. Disillusioned by the Cultural Revolution, the whole of society reflected on its root causes and on the nature of Chinese society. Based on my own experiences of life in the two urban worlds described in this book — alleyway neighbourhoods and work-unit campuses — I could not help but feel their resemblance to traditional societies. Instead of thinking of the order as externally imposed, I aimed to identify the foundation — an endogenously generated social order.

I began to think about danwei (workplace) as a basic social environment. But at that time I did not know of the publication of Andrew Walder’s book, Communist Neo-traditionalism (1986). By 1989, I thought that I had discovered a physics-like dynamic for the longevity and super-stability of Chinese society, despite periodical peasant revolutions. But the idea seemed quite ridiculous to me. I put the draft paper aside. Some years later, the editor of a Chinese journal, Chengshi Yanjiu (Urban Research), visited the University of Hong Kong, where I was a PhD student. I passed the manuscript to him and published it in the journal. Of course, the idea was neither controversial nor received much xvii xviii attention. On the other hand, based on some life experience and imagination, another article on the ‘types and characteristics of Chinese urban communities’, published in 1992, was actually widely noted in China, because it was one of the earliest articles on the community (shequ), which only became a major topic in the 2000s.

While I later have observed two other types — ‘commodity housing’ estates and urban villages — I have no direct living experience and have only studied them as empirical research objects. It is more difficult for me to imagine urban life without close engagement. They are ‘new’ types. However, I do not suggest that they represent a contrast between the old and the new. All types of neighbourhoods are subject to a similar context of emergent urbanism, which was not observed in a traditional and ‘totalised’ (zongti) society. For the word ‘totalised’, there is also a translation problem because zongti is perhaps better translated as ‘comprehensive’. Here my position is perhaps slightly different from neo-traditionalism. I intend to attribute stability to the nature of the under-bureaucratised and embedded state-society relationship.

As for governance change, in advanced capitalist economies neoliberalisation is seen as a process of welfare state retreat. China had a much smaller sphere of welfare provision only for industrialised workplaces (danwei). Thinking in terms of traditionalism, the state was embedded in the society, perhaps also owing to the deliberate practice of the ‘mass line’ (qunzhong luxian) - maintaining association with the mass. The state was temporarily pushed out by the process of marketisation it initiated as a practical solution to economic growth. To understand the changing social order through a new coordination approach (governance), I go beyond marketisation per se. Again, from a microscopic view of urban neighbourhoods, the way I was thinking about China in the 1980s, what we have observed since is an ‘urban revolution’. Because of the slow development of society, for whatever reasons, intended or unintended, society’s self-protection is not characterised as social movements, leading to a self-organised society but rather by a more visible and professionalised state. In the sphere of urban planning, I noted in my earlier book that Planning for Growth (2015) perhaps should not be seen as for the market interest but rather as dealing with the problems created by market development and pursuing an overall legitimate goal of national prosperity and modernisation. In this book, from the vantage of neighbourhoods, I observe urban revolution at the grassroots and explain governance changes in this context.

The book was written during lockdown. Unable to travel to do the fieldwork, what I could do was a virtual journey. I stopped watching the

PREFACE depressing news about infection rates and the death toll — they are not a football match score deserving constant attention. The virtual tour is of course full of images. I wished to revisit these places to take new pictures for the book. But this is still not possible. Now, looking back, what makes these photos interesting is time. The sense of history adds some appeal. My intention is just to show the reader what I have seen on the ground of very ordinary places.

Now completing this book in London, I am pondering what it is about. Perhaps as the saying, ‘in the past three thousand years, a fundamental change has occurred’ (E= FRE- KSE ci sangian yunian yi da bianju ye), the book depicts a landscape that ‘differential relation persists but its mode perished’ (FWE , ty ICT chaxu yizai, geju wucun).

PREFACE xix

XX

Acknowledgements

It has been a long journey though the book was written up quite quickly during short lockdowns. My first expression of thanks goes to my mentors along this journey, Gonghao Cui, Anthony Gar-On Yeh and Chris Webster. Professor Cui at Nanjing University is a pioneer in the studies of China urbanisation. Professor Yeh at the University of Hong Kong is one of the first Western academics on social areas of Chinese cities. Professor Webster inspired me on gated community research, although our work at Cardiff University was mainly on urban simulation and morphologies. I had the privilege to co-edit Restructuring the Chinese City with Laurence Ma, who pioneered Western academic research on the geography of China. I participated in and greatly benefited from the Urban China Research Network, of which John Logan is the founding director. His insights on housing and residential segregation in China are a major source of inspiration. I thank Zhigang Li who did research on residential segregation with me and hosted and accompanied me on many journeys to interesting sites. Shenjing He studied urban regeneration, poverty and neighbourhood governance together in related research projects. Nick Phelps, Yuemin Ning, Chaolin Gu, Yuting Liu, Yuan Yuan, Jian Feng, Zhen Wang, Sainan Lin, Yuqi Liu, Ningying Huang collaborated on various research related to neighbourhoods or governance. Lan Zhou, Yanjing Zhao Guofang Zhai, Mingfeng Wang, Yang Xiao, Jie Shen, Guohui Long, Xigang Zhu, Tianke Zhu, and the late Qiyan Wu helped with various field visits.

I thank Tingting Lu for her photo from her PhD research on the gated community in Wenzhou and wonderful assistance. Among many research trips, the journeys to urban villages in the hottest summer with Fangzhu Zhang were unforgettable. I also thank my classmate and friend, Qing Deng, who was a senior real estate consultant, for opening my eyes to the real estate market. My friends Jinying Lin and Zhong Tang gave me chances to see their homes and businesses. My extended family, uncles and aunts, and their friends helped find contacts in various neighbourhoods. On urban China research and on the topics related to this book, I learnt from stimulating conversations with Yixin Zhou, Cecilia Wong, Yaping Wang, Si-Ming Li, Youqin Huang, Alan Smart, George Lin, Cindy Fan, Youtien Hsing, Weiping Wu, Xuefei Ren, Ben Read, Deborah Davis, Min Zhou, Hyun Bang Shin and the late Choon-Piew Pow. I collaborated with Jennifer Robinson on her project of Governing the Future City, through which I discovered more about comparative urbanism and her insights on governance. I also thank Roger Keil for involving me in his Global Suburbanism project, which prompted me to pay more attention to suburban governance. Mark Frazier and Yawei Chen hosted my visits and provided me with great chances for research dissemination. On urban studies, I had beneficial conversations with Ananya Roy, Chris Hamnett, Simon Parker, Talja Blokland, Setha Low and the late Ray Forrest. I thank Bruce Hunt for reading my manuscript. I thank colleagues at my home institution, Bartlett School of Planning, the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, especially Alan Penn, Nick Gallent and Claudio de Magalhães, for their collegial support, in particular to the China Planning Research Group. I incidentally discovered a chapter by our Dean of the Bartlett, Christoph Lindner, on postmetroplis urbanism in Hong Kong and the film of Wong Kai-Wai; I enjoyed both the film and my time in Hong Kong. Writing with anonymous reviewers in mind is often a disturbance. However, now I wish to thank these reviewers because their reviews were insightful and constructive, which helped me think further about the key message of this book. I thank the commissioning editor at UCL Press, Chris Penfold, who made efficient editorial and publication arrangements. I am grateful for being entitled to open access under UCL Press. Finally, among many research projects, I particularly acknowledge the funding support from the European Research Council (ERC) (Advanced Grant — ChinaUrban, grant agreement No. 832845).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxi

Rural China: a society from the soil

Fei Xiaotong, a renowned Chinese sociologist, described the foundations of Chinese society as ‘earth-bounded’ (Fei 1947/1992). In such an earth-bounded society the social structure was characterised by the order of so-called chaxugeju (the differential mode of association), which is the basic organisational principle of rural China. Different from clearly defined social boundaries in Western society, traditional Chinese society was ‘just like the circles that appear on the surface of a lake when a rock is thrown into it. Everyone stands at the centre of the circles produced by his or her own’ (p. 62). Rural society is essentially a society of acquaintance, in which one is ‘differentially associated’ with the inner circle of family members, then the outer circle of extended family members, and further out, the ring of villagers. These differential associations integrate individuals into a society with dense social networks. Because of close but varying associations, rural villages were governed by social norms rather than laws or regulations. While the concept indicates the characteristic of Chinese culture in terms of differential relations, it concurs that the rural society is built upon tight-knit primary relations. The concept is applied in this book with an emphasis on collectivism derived from association instead of the nature of ‘differentiation’. Although villages did not represent a special spatial scale, they were meaningful places in which families, extended families and clans lived together. The rural village thus is presented as an ideal type, representing characteristics opposite to those of urbanism defined by Louis Wirth (1938).

However, Fei’s earth-bounded village is not confined to rurality. It is a cultural interpretation of the entire Chinese society. In this sense, his concept of differential mode of association is not a Weberian ideal type to present a concept but rather depicting the empirical world.’

The differential mode is an abstraction of the social relation of China’s rural families and kinships.* He presented a rather unique Chinese cultural feature beyond the generic contrast between urban and rural social characterisation (for example, the classic sociological notion of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft by Ferdinand Tonnies‘). The social relations are not only close but also differentiated, stronger with close social proximity. Because of limited geographical mobility, such social proximity also turns into territorial bonding. As a cultural and social description, the differential mode of association transcends the distinction between the rural and the urban. In other words, although mainly referring to rural China, the mode can be extrapolated into the description of Chinese cities in the imperial era, which was a predominantly ‘earth-bounded’ society.”

Although the differential mode of association can be a base to suggest that social relation (guanxi) widely exists in modern China,° the original purpose of Fei’s conceptualisation is to make a contrast between rural society and market society, as explained by Jack Barbalet (2021b):

Perhaps the most pertinent element of Fei’s treatment of chaxugeju, however, that deflects its viability as a model for guanxi is his prognosis mentioned earlier in this article, that with the development of market society in China the days of chaxugeju are numbered. This reflects the way Fei juxtaposes rural society and market society. (p. 376)

In the same way, Fei’s concept is used in this book as a defined self-centred relation that lacks individualism. While rural markets were well developed in China, and commercial activities were flourishing and accommodated in market towns, forming the urban system and regional economies as early as in the Tang and Song dynasties as shown by William Skinner (1977), the commercial activities did not introduce market logic into the dominant principle of social relation. China had not been thoroughly ‘urbanised’ in Fei Xiaotong’s time.’ Fei’s concept refers to social relations that are often called ‘traditional’ (particularistic, ascriptive) in contrast to the supposed ‘modern’ relations of impersonalism and legal-based norms.® Here, Fei was influenced by the Weberian idea of Occidental modernity. But he also tried to depict the world of rural China that was constructed upon families and lineages. They formed place-based attachment and moral order. Besides lineage, a native-place association commonly found in late imperial and republican China is another example of the differential mode of association affecting urban governance.’ These territorially based or related social relations have been severely impacted in China’s ‘urban revolution’ today, though the native-place identity and relation continue to exist in urban villages. This book examines these changes of territorial relations at a close distance in typical residential neighbourhoods.

The city in imperial China was mainly an administrative centre. But the differential mode of association as an indigenous, self-centred, bottom-up and decaying-with-distance governance mechanism necessarily deters the escalation of bureaucratisation in society. In imperial China, the power of the emperor did not intrude into vast numbers of rural villages. Nor was it visible in the everyday life of ordinary people living in the city. Fei observed that:

Rural society is a small-scale peasant economy, and, if necessary, each peasant household can become self-sufficient, except for a few items of daily necessity. The household may simply close its doors on the larger economy. When this occurs, we can imagine that the scope of consensual power would also decrease. Judging from the reality of people’s lives in agrarian societies, then, we can see that the power structure, although it may be labeled a ‘dictatorship’, is actually loose, weak, and nominal. It is a government that does not actively govern at all. (Fei 1947/1992, 113)

The county seats were the lowest base of administrative power. The vast rural area was governed by the gentry, representing the social order — and the consequential morality acceptable to its associated members.'°

The gentry had the ‘legitimacy to govern, because they were a moral exemplar rather than being endorsed by a procedure, either externally (for example, appointment) or internally (for example, voting). ‘Self-governance’ was buttressed by baojia — an administrative organisational system (see later discussion). Although baojia represented a formal institution, its principle was more a decentralised system of local responsibility, making neighbourhood and village leaders accountable for anti-government political actions. Most of the time, this formal institution did not operate on routine neighbourhood governance or reciprocal social support. Therefore, the society from the soil is an organic one, maintaining order not chaos, but not a bureaucratised society. It is in this context that we should understand the (lacking) role of the city in social governance.

As the seat of administrative power, the city had a salient element: yamen (the government compound).'! But beyond this confined space of formal bureaucracy, other activities were ‘suppressed’ or found it difficult to flourish, because the Confucian elites all preferred to pursue their careers in the government rather than becoming merchants.'” While in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) China saw an embryonic urban culture brought about by booming commerce, the city as a space outside traditional governance by gentry and with limited yet effective administration was absent; professional associations were not developed into a ‘civil society and community in the modern sense. The Chinese city can still be regarded as an earth-bounded society.

As mentioned earlier, the conceptualisation of earth-bounded society based on the differential mode of association is not exclusively applied to the system of agricultural production but rather originates from a social and moral order. The vast area of the Chinese city was occupied by traditional cellular neighbourhoods, which were alleyway housing neighbourhoods. The residents had occupations different from agricultural production as merchants and craftsmen, but differential mode of association applied well to this kind of society.

The Chinese title of Fei’s book is transliterated directly as Rural China, and the published English title is From the Soil. The book is not about the countryside, but rather about a social construct of villages originating from the specific field site of his anthropological investigation (Kaixiangong village in southern Jiangsu province). It represents Chinese society at that time. As argued earlier, this characterisation can be extrapolated to include the city although the city was rather peripheral and China was not really urbanised. In Rural China, the city is not a generic term. This book will further argue that differential mode of association can also be extrapolated temporally into industrialised cities under socialism. Despite revolutionary change after 1949, Chinese society was not fully urbanised until after the economic reform. From the perspective of urban studies, particularly urbanism, I will revisit how differential mode of association — represented as ‘communist neo-traditionalism’ — continued to maintain a society from the soil.

There has been a long tradition of thinking of cities in the Orient as different from the European city, or the ‘Occidental City’, as in sixteenthcentury Europe in the account of Max Weber. Hartmut Haussermann and Anne Haila (2005) explain that, according to Weber:

The role of city dwellers also differentiated European cities from cities in Asia. Whereas in Europe citizens participated in the local administration, in China urban dwellers belonged to their families and native villages, while in India urban dwellers were members of different castes.

For Max Weber, cities were special kinds of societies. In Europe, the contrast between the city and the countryside was clearly defined. Up to the beginning of modernity, the border between the urban and the rural was demarcated by walls. The walls also separated different types of societies. Cities distinguished themselves sharply from the surrounding feudal countryside. Inside the city walls, economic and political life flourished and cities became the breeding ground for the new mode of production — capitalism — and Occidental modernity. (p. 51)

In other words, the development of the city in the West represents the advancement of modernism. The implication of modernisation for everyday life is the bureaucratisation of social relationships. Social and cultural innovations fostered capitalism.

In contrast, the Chinese imperial city was the site of administration with limited commercial activities. Laurence Ma (2009) explained:

As seats of administration and local political power, cities were walled for defence and local population control. Aside from city walls, the most salient spatial element of the cities was the government district consisting of a set of local government buildings (yamen) that served as the nerve centre of a city. Other key spaces in the cities included official residences, military compounds, drum and bell towers, granaries, schools, temples, and commercial areas. (pp. 66-7)

Urban markets were marginal in location and restricted in their time of operation until the nineteenth century. Although commercial activities were no longer restricted and became dispersed across the city, ‘significant commercial capitalism failed to appear in Chinese cities because the most profitable commodities such as salt and tea were monopolised by the state and the Confucian elites all preferred to pursue government service as their career goal’.*

This landscape changed dramatically after the establishment of the treaty-port cities following the Opium War. International settlements and foreign concession areas were set up. Foreign merchants and entrepreneurs formed their own spaces outside the walled Chinese cities, showing a contrast between the under-serviced Chinese part and the European quarters with modern building codes." The influx of rural migrants and war refugees and a growing working class in Shanghai led to an increasing urban population in the 1920s and 1930s. The rich

Chinese began to seek the protection of Western extraterritorial power in international settlements and concession areas, creating a mix of Chinese and foreigners in these places. The real estate boom in Shanghai created a landscape of shikumen — a ‘stone portal gate’ style of terraced housing with an internal courtyard.

The quality of the housing and public services in international settlements and French concession areas was superior to the Chinese walled city.'° The development of foreign residences led to citywide residential differentiation — as in Shanghai, the residential areas were differentiated into upper and lower quarters. In upper-market areas, cultural entertainment and amenities flourished, symbolising a new middle-class culture.” In the peripheries of cities, slums became widespread, accommodating the influx of migrants from the countryside which suffered from constant wars and became impoverished in industrialisation driven by Western imperialism.

China’s efforts to modernise its cities were short lived. In the 1920s and 1930s, as a semi-colonial treaty-port city, a thriving financial capital, and an early industrialising city, Shanghai arguably developed a ‘cosmopolitan’ culture.'® This ‘middle-class’ culture was built upon material comfort, as re-emerging consumerism has been since the 1980s.” Learning from Western city planning, Chinese planners trained in the West even envisioned in the Greater Shanghai Plan of 1927 the building of a new civic centre in Jiangwan, Shanghai’s exurb at that time, to serve the public. The public facilities were to include a library, a stadium, a museum and a hospital to enhance the quality of life. At the centre was the city hall. From the perspective of city planning,

The new civic centre was planned to combine Chinese architectural style with a Western planning concept. This would be a new monumental civic centre, not like a traditional Chinese government compound — yamen, which symbolises imperial or magisterial power. The central square was to be surrounded by ‘public buildings’ such as the library and stadium and open to the public, which aimed to enhance the quality of everyday life. (Wu 2015, 10)

Except for a few buildings, the civic centre did not materialise, due to the Japanese invasion. The city hall was completed and survived but became the administration building within the ‘work-unit compound’ of Shanghai Physical Education College after 1949. The building was therefore not open to the public. In fact, outsiders could not even access the place as it was a work-unit territory. The extent of the influence of Western modernist planning and middle-class cosmopolitanism on neighbourhood structure and governance in Shanghai before 1949 is unknown. We can only speculate about this past life from observing the lane housing neighbourhoods in old Shanghai.

As a fusion of traditional courtyard and modern terraced housing, shikumen alleyway houses were real estate projects to maximise profits from rent and were uniformly constructed.” The residents were an emerging ‘middle class’ of small workshop owners and foremen or forewomen in factories, as Jie Li (2015) observed:

The Republican-era residents of Alliance Lane also led hybrid lifestyles - as compradors (intermediaries) whose livelihoods depended on foreign industries, as dandies who danced in jazzy ball-rooms with Western clothes, and as Confucian patriarchs and matriarchs who maintained strict domestic hierarchies and imprisoned daughters-in-law in their inner chambers. (p. 36)

Although designed for multiple occupancies, these lane houses initially had a lower density than the later crowded houses created through subdivision and densification after 1949. We can only speculate that these lane houses in the republican era maintained a certain privacy while, as a popular and mixed residential environment, neighbourhood interaction increased through the length of residency. These neighbourhoods, in their architectural style, had a strong social imprint of rural communities. Still, perhaps time was too short for the Chinese city to evolve into self-organised communities. After 1949, alleyway housing neighbourhoods became marginalised as their petit-bourgeois urbanities were not at the centre of state-led industrialisation.

This brief historical review of Chinese society and its urban history shows that despite commercial activities, limited administrative functions and the short-lived cosmopolitan middle-class culture in treaty-port cities, Chinese society, including rural and urban places, remained as an earth-bounded society from the soil. I will show in the next section that the Chinese city in the socialist era still maintained such a character, even though the economy experienced state-led industrialisation.

The neo-traditionalism of the Chinese socialist city

If the Chinese city in the imperial era is not a theoretically meaningful object, then what is the meaning of the ‘socialist city’ for China after

1949? This question has a theoretical implication. For the European city, or the capitalist city more generally, Manuel Castells (1977) asked ‘the urban question’, arguing that the city had lost its meaning as an ecological contrast to the rural area, empirically researched by the Chicago School. The city was integrated into the national economy by the Keynesian welfare state. Under the welfare state, the (capitalist) city has lost its meaning as a distinctive form of social life. The main ‘urban’ function was the venue for the welfare state to organise ‘collective consumption’ through its redistribution.

After the communist revolution, the Chinese city was transformed from a consumption base to a production site for state-led industrialisation.”! In contrast to the countryside, the city represented the domain of the state. The level of formalisation or bureaucratisation, however, varied between the old urban core with private housing and the new industrial areas. The latter more thoroughly reflect socialist planning principles. However, compared with Eastern European and Soviet cities, China witnessed a much lower level of industrialisation and the lack of a thorough transformation of its cities. I argue that, because consumption was constrained, the Chinese city did not see an emergent urbanism along its industrialisation during the socialist period. Like the earth-bounded society from the soil, the socialist city maintained an organic order from differential mode of association. In addition, this order of traditionalism was deliberately maintained through its work-unit system.

The city remained peripheral in industrial organisation. Instead, state work-units (danwei) became the basic unit for organising economic activities, consumption and housing provision. The city, as a spatial form, is more or less a collection of work-units plus traditional neighbourhoods built before the revolution. City-wide bureaucratisation was much underdeveloped. Strong evidence comes from city planning. In China, development control under the city/municipality was not established until 1990 when the first city planning ordinance was enacted.” It is therefore difficult to conceive of Chinese city planning as planning in the ‘public domain’,”* not because of state authoritarianism and the lack of civil society, but because such a vocabulary implies a city-based politics.

In contrast, although the city is a territory of local government, sectoral administration has always been strong. The absence of civil society and the influence of the state over everyday lives through its work-units meant that the state had strong influence over urban development. But such language of the state controlling society is inappropriate, as will be seen from an ‘urban’ perspective, because the Chinese state was deeply embedded into its society. For example, in terms of land use control, state work-units played an important role in self-regulation through their discretionary decision-making power over land uses. The role of the city government was to supplement work-units through citywide infrastructure provision, to fill the gaps between work-units. Comprehensive urban development was rare.**

Despite revolutionary change after 1949, traditionalism continued, formalised and in some aspects strengthened by work-unit socialism. There are two related conceptualisations by Andrew Walder (1986) and Liping Sun (2004, 2008). Both disregarded state socialism as an ‘authoritarian state’ and tried to find a description of how the state organises social life, respectively from industrialisation and its organisational form, and social organisation. Their studies do not particularly focus on urbanism; but both are related to the socialist city and point out the absent space outside the collective/public/state realm. Walder examines labour processes and welfare within work-units; Sun stresses pervasive, penetrating, wide-ranging state functions and resource controls which displace and overlap with society. They paid attention to the local sphere and provided a picture of urban life in the socialist city. In the planned economy, the state organised collective consumption through state work-units. These work-units were more than production units; they were ‘totalised social entities’ carrying out service provision, housing development and distribution, and social management.

Walder criticised both the totalitarian interpretation and ‘interest groups’ (e.g., fraction or civil society) explanation of the Chinese state. Because the membership of the work-unit was permanent and the interaction between the state and individuals occurred closely within a short distance of the work-unit, the work-unit was a societal organisation, in which the relation was particularistic rather than impersonal. Because the state controlled the resources of work-units, within which workers were obliged to live, this created ‘organisational dependence’, which led to the concentration of state power. Walder describes the dominance of state work-units in social lives as ‘communist neo-traditionalism’. On this point, this particularism resonates with Fei’s differential mode of association because in the society from the soil, relationships are differentiated. Although Walder did not regard neo-traditionalism as in continuity with traditional society, the territorial aspect of the work-unit compound as a combination of living and work implied a replication of similar relations of dependence and of the comprehensiveness of social relations (and hence difficult to maintain as ‘impersonal’ and universal).