Campaign-style governance (运动式治理) has been the crux of the Leninist bureaucracy in contemporary China. While existing research has theorized campaign-style governance as a form of bureaucratic control, less attention has been paid to the wide variations in local leadership's policy responsiveness to campaign signals. Why do some sub-national governments respond more aggressively to campaigns than others? By bridging together the literature on campaign politics and grassroots micro-governance, this paper examines how state grassroots infrastructural power shapes local policy implementation during nationwide political campaigns. I argue that grassroots administrative capacity—the organizational and institutional infrastructure linking the state to society—conditions the intensity of local implementation. Where local states possess stronger infrastructural power, they are better able to mobilize personnel, coordinate enforcement, and implement restrictive policies. This argument is tested using the case of China's Zero-COVID campaign (2020–2022). I construct a sub-national panel dataset combining official data on residents' committees (RCs) with policy response indicators from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT). A set of two-level hierarchical linear mixed-effect models provides consistent support for the argument: provinces with deeper grassroots penetration of the party-state tend to respond more strongly to the Zero-COVID campaign. However, this effect is attenuated during large-scale outbreaks, when surging infections overwhelm local state capacity. Additional analyses further suggest that grassroots infrastructural power operates asymmetrically across national policy shifts, strengthening coercive and resource-intensive public health interventions more than economic support provision.
Kristoff (Yifan) Cao (Sat,) studied this question.