Abstract: Rural society in China is currently grappling with governance dilemmas characterized by imbalances in power and responsibility, task overload, and procedural formalism. As a key coping mechanism, the “responsibility system of guarantee” urgently requires theoretical elucidation regarding its effectiveness and sustainability in practice. Existing studies tend to focus on a single logic—such as pressure transmission, target management, or campaign-style mobilization—and thus fail to systematically reveal the complex interactions between “politics” and “administration” embedded within the system. To fill this theoretical gap, this paper introduces a two-dimensional analytical framework of “political integration and bureaucratic regulation”. The study finds that the operational core of the responsibility system of guarantee lies in the dual-track coordination and dynamic transformation between political integration and bureaucratic regulation. The former drives systemic mobilization and structural reconstruction through political potential, injecting momentum into bureaucratic governance; the latter provides institutionalized channels for the release of political momentum by accomplishing goal setting, process control, and incentive accountability through technical rationality. This mechanism innovation constitutes a two-way mutual construction of “politics creating bureaucracy and bureaucracy regulating politics”, aiming to transcend simplistic political mobilization or administrative contracting, and to prevent rural governance from falling into systemic dilemmas of value depletion or technical involution. It thereby offers a new theoretical perspective for understanding the resilience of grassroots governance with Chinese characteristics and the modernization of state governance.

Key words: political integration, bureaucratic regulation, rural governance, responsibility system of guarantee