Key to authoritarian politics is maintaining social control over the masses. To this end the ruling regime may employ a variety of instruments, from controlled legislatures to the secret police, to effect compliance and surveillance. However, most instruments studied so far do not reach or cover the grassroots level sufficiently, leaving open the question of authoritarian control on the ground. In this paper we propose a largely overlooked type of instruments, neighbourhood organisations (NO), to partly fulfil the gap. Nominally resident-led but actually state-controlled, these organisations can perform the key control tasks of policy enforcement and information gathering for the regime in urban neighbourhoods. Specifically, we identify the main factors for such functions as their dual characters of local embeddedness and state dependency. Using an original 11-year panel from 31 Chinese regions, we show with mixed beta models a robust positive association between regime domestic security concerns and neighbourhood organisation staff coverage. Drawing on present and related evidence, we argue that these organisations can strengthen the autocrat’s control over local society and consolidate its rule. We duly call for greater attention to the local level of politics in authoritarian studies.