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PurposeThis study intends to explore the opportunities and roles of Macao's universities in the education and training development of Hengqin under the General Plan of the Development of the Guangdong–Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin promulgated in August 2021.Design/methodology/approachThis study is intended to analyze the role of Macao’ universities in Hengqin development, based on data collected through interviewing with dozens of scholars and government officials from Macao and Hengqin, and government reports, news reports and other relevant data.FindingsThe General Plan provides Macao's universities with opportunities to develop education and training in Hengqin. On the one hand, Hengqin can be the locus of Macao's tertiary education diversification; Macao's universities can jointly establish technological research institutions and set up postdoctoral research centers and university branches to enroll master's and doctoral students from Mainland China. On the other hand, Macao's universities can set up a branch of professional training and open training courses in Hengqin. These efforts are designed to promote technological innovation and cultural diffusion in Macao.Originality/valueThis study analyses the potential role of Macao's universities in developing education and training in Hengqin since the central policy was announced last August. This study will be of interest to scholars as well as policymakers.

This paper aims to shed fresh light on rural-urban interaction and urbanization in a non-Western authoritarian context. It describes the change in postMao China from very vertical and separate government hierarchies for rural and urban areas, which inhibited rural-urban interactions, to a city-managing-county model, with rural counties around a city coming under the jurisdiction of the city government. Drawing on field research and statistical data, the paper elucidates the dynamics and complexities of this model, arguing that the combination of city-based bureaucrats favouring the city and the priority given to economic growth mandated by the central government often meant a lack of attention to rural development and support for county government. The paper also comments on the recent development of the province-managing-county model in China, and argues that given an urbancentred administrative system, whether the current reform can change the political and administrative equilibrium in China remains an open question.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of Wuhan, and strict control was imposed in many major Chinese cities, including the national capital of Beijing. Residents’ committee workers at the grass-roots level have played a critical role in the enforcement of the government’s pandemic prevention and control measures, through their day-to-day service and surveillance as local community managers. This article examines their work in Wuhan and Beijing neighbourhoods during the most critical periods of the outbreak, from late January to June 2020, and the challenges the workers faced as executors of the government’s community-based prevention policy. The two cities have developed different community strategies because of very different epidemiological situations and city functions.

Local governments in China are seriously under-funded relative to their assigned expenditure responsibilities for public services, resulting in the infamous 'revenueexpenditure gap'. The dominant explanation of local fiscal difficulties given in the literature refers to central government behaviour, namely the excessive centralization of tax revenue, but it does not tally with the large flows of central subsidies to local coffers in more recent years. The alternative account we put forward stresses the working of an intermediary level embedded in the multi-tiered governance structure of a large country, and the interaction between local officials' fiscal behaviour and the revenue -expenditure gap. Employing fine-grained analysis of aggregate statistics and local case data, we argue that broader intergovernmental dynamics and practices of local intermediaries, and not only central government policy, are critical to fiscal health and government performance at the county level.