While substantial research has studied the guestworker governance, highlighting the roles of private actors. However, the existing literature pays less attention to the conditions that give rise to different guestworker governing strategies. Through a case study of a recent guestworker program adopted in Guangxi, China, I study the ways the decentralization of migration governance authority created the conditions for the local government’s strategies of regulating guestworkers. Different from most guestworker schemes elsewhere, the current program is characterized by a significant level of decentralization of authority from the central state to the local government. Based on interviews conducted in winter 2021, I find that the local government adopted the strategies of privatizing migration governance and selectively governing during the regulation of the guestworker program. The privatization of migration governance describes the local government’s practice of outsourcing the tasks of monitoring and controlling guestworkers to private labor agencies. And the selective governance refers to the local government’s strategy of uneven regulation enforcement on rule violations and on different groups of Vietnamese migrant workers. I argue that the decentralization of migration governance is influential in the local government’s adoption of these two strategies.