From Village to Region: How Everyday Practices Reconfigure Scale in China’s Local Governance

From Village to Region

At first glance, Houhai looks like a familiar story of regional development in China. A small fishing village on the southern coast of Hainan becomes a booming surf-tourism destination; the government steps in to restore order, and a state-owned company is created to regulate the industry and align it with wider development goals. From this angle, the village seems like the endpoint of a larger process, where decisions made elsewhere are finally implemented.

But Houhai reveals something more important. The village is not simply where regional governance arrives. It is one of the places where it is actually made.

My recent research, based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Houhai, starts from a simple puzzle. If Chinese governance is really as top-down as it is often imagined, why do policies on the ground so often depend on negotiation, adjustment, and compromise? Why do formal interventions work only unevenly, and why do they so often rely on the very local arrangements they are supposed to replace?

Houhai offers a sharp answer. Long before the state moved in, the village’s rise as a surf hotspot had already been driven by mobile surfers, migrants, small entrepreneurs, and dense local networks. By 2022, however, rapid growth had also produced mounting complaints about overcrowding, safety, and over-commercialisation. In response, officials established a state-owned tourism development company and introduced a more formal regulatory framework, including licensing, certification, and tighter control over maritime space.

This could be read as a straightforward extension of state authority. But the reality was messier. The new system did not simply replace what came before. It had to work through it. The company could not run Houhai’s surf economy by decree alone; it had to rely on existing clubs, instructors, local knowledge, and informal cooperation to make regulation function in practice. Rules were introduced, but also adjusted. Standards were enforced, but selectively. Unofficial arrangements, including flexible working practices among instructors, were often tolerated because they kept the local economy operating.

This is why Houhai matters beyond one village. It suggests that scale should not be treated as a fixed hierarchy, with the local sitting below the regional and national. What we call “the region” is also assembled through everyday negotiations in places like this one. Higher-level policy only becomes effective when it is translated into local practice, and that process can reshape both the meaning of the policy and the balance of power on the ground. In my paper, I describe this through three linked processes: enactment, translation, and recalibration.

The consequences are uneven, and the organisation of surf instruction makes this especially clear. Under the new regulatory framework, instructors were expected to become certified and work through more formal employment arrangements. Yet, everyday practice did not fit neatly into this model. Many instructors preferred short-term, flexible work, while surf clubs depended on these arrangements to keep lessons affordable and responsive to tourist demand. As a result, regulation did not simply replace informality. It had to pass through the clubs, instructors, and working routines that already sustained the surf economy. Larger commercial clubs were better able to adapt to licensing, price rules, and service standards, while smaller or more lifestyle-oriented clubs found it harder to fit the new system. Governance, in other words, did not create a single orderly local society. It reorganised differences: between formal businesses and flexible workers, between larger operators and smaller clubs, and between those able to align with the new rules and those pushed towards the margins.

Seen from this angle, local governance in China looks less like a neat administrative ladder and more like an ongoing process of coordination across uneven actors, interests, and spatial logics. The region is not simply above the village. It is partly produced within it. That is why everyday life matters analytically. If we want to understand how regional development actually works, we need to look not only at plans, policies, and institutions, but also at the mundane settings where they are interpreted, bent, contested, and made workable.

Read more about this research here: Zhang, S. (2026). The everyday political economy of local governance in China: Bridging relational and territorial thinking. Regional Studies, 60(1), 2606362. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2025.2606362