State Territorialisation Without Urbanisation: Governing Rural China Under ‘Rural Revitalisation’

ABSTRACT

Amid the global dynamics of planetary urbanisation, urbanisation has been the frontier of a state territorialisation process of enhancing territorial control and spatial governance. However, recent state strategies in China, exemplified by Rural Revitalisation, reflect a renewed political focus on rural society within state‐driven spatial governance. This study argues that this shift produces a distinctive form of ‘territorialisation without urbanisation’, where the state consolidates control by governing in place—embedding its authority within rural space without converting it into urban jurisdictions. It does so through both spatially bounded and relationally reorienting mechanisms. Beyond traditional territorial urbanisation approaches such as territorial regulation and administrative upscaling, the state further reconfigures state‐society and state‐market relations via grassroots party‐building and fiscal mobilisation. The study illustrates these techniques based on the governance transformation of a village in southwestern China.