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Economy and Society

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Building ‘Community’: New

Strategies of Governance in
Urban China
David Bray
Published online: 17 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: David Bray (2006) Building ‘Community’: New Strategies
of Governance in Urban China, Economy and Society, 35:4, 530-549, DOI:
10.1080/03085140600960799

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 Economy and Society Volume 35 Number 4 November 2006: 530
549

Building ‘Community’: new

strategies of governance in
urban China
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David Bray

Abstract

Under the planned economy China’s urban population was largely immobile and
governed through the socialist workunit (danwei) . Market reforms begun in the 1980s
have culminated in the last decade with a dramatic decline of the state-sector and the
emergence of a more mobile, heterogeneous and economically independent urban
population. In rendering the old system obsolete, these trends have led the Chinese
government to rethink its strategies for urban governance. At the turn of the
millennium, a new campaign to ‘build communities’ was launched throughout the
nation with the objective of establishing the residential ‘community’ as the new basic
unit of urban governance. This paper explores the logic behind this policy innovation
and analyzes the techniques adopted to operationalize ‘community governance’.

Keywords: China; urban; governance; community; policy.

Introduction1

China’s rapid transformation over the past decade has generated a great deal of
commentary, yet little attention has been devoted to the growing prominence
of the idea of ‘community’ within public discourse in the People’s Republic of
China (PRC). The Chinese term for ‘community’, (shequ ), was used by China’s
first generation of sociologists in the 1930s and 1940s, but it disappeared from
public discourse when the Communist Party-led government banned sociology
in the early 1950s.2 The rehabilitation of sociology as a discipline in the 1980s
has seen the term return to general scholarly usage (Guo 1993: 3). More

David Bray, Department of Chinese Studies and South-East Asian Studies, The University
of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: david.bray@arts.usyd.edu.au

Copyright # 2006 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140600960799
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 531

importantly, perhaps, the term has found its way into official governmental
discourse: first, in the mid-1980s with the promotion of ‘community services’
(shequ fuwu ); and secondly, since the mid-1990s, with the strategy for
‘community building’ (shequ jianshe). The growing concern with the concept
of community in China reflects a recent trend, apparent in a number of other
polities, to re-valorize the role of community within systems of governance
(Rose 1999: 167). From New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ to the New Commu-
nitarians of the American right, the ‘community’ has been presented as a
resource that can be mobilized to address a wide range of political, social,
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ethical and economic problems. While the discussion of ‘community’ in China

is situated within domestic debates around local governance and social welfare
that have emerged in response to the decline of the planned economy and
associated institutions, it is also informed by international discourses on
community. In China as elsewhere, ‘community’ has been posited in part as a
counterweight to cultural, social and political fragmentation which is often
seen as a negative consequence of globalization.
One of the more interesting aspects of the emergence of community policy in
China is the speed with which the concept of ‘community’ has been transformed
from a relatively abstract idea into a specific institutional model. According to
central government policy documents circulated nationally at the end of 2000
(Minzhengbu 2000), the ‘community’ is now designated as the basic unit of urban
social, political and administrative organization. The objective of this study is to
chart the development of this policy and the discourse relating to its practical
implementation. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first, I discuss
concepts of community in the broader global context, with a particular focus on
how debates on ‘The Third Way’ and ‘New Communitarianism’ have influenced
thinking on the role of ‘community’. In the second section, I explore how the
recent emergence of a discourse on ‘community’ has been central to the
formation of new ways for government to think about and address social
problems in urban China. Finally, I describe and analyze the ‘Shenyang Model’,
one of the most influential regional models for the practical implementation of
‘community building’ in China today. My focus throughout this study is on the
emergence of a new rationality of urban governance: the primary sources for this
analysis are central and local government documents, supplemented by inter-
views with local government officials and ‘community’ cadres, undertaken
during field trips to a number of ‘communities’ in Shenyang.3 It should be noted
that consideration of the outcomes of ‘community building’
including the
effectiveness of various implementation strategies and popular reception within
target populations
is beyond the scope of this paper.

‘Community’, morality and government

The concept of ‘community’ has a long and diverse history of usage. According
to Raymond Williams (1983: 75), it originally referred to the ‘commons’ or
 532 Economy and Society

common people as distinct from the nobility. Later it came to be used to refer
to the people of a district and also to groups of people with a common
background, interest or identity: hence one can talk of the ‘local community’
but also of the ‘black community’, ‘gay community’ or ‘business community’.
Since the 1960s, at least, the idea of community has come to embody much
more than just descriptive significance. Community has been invoked by many,
under the rubric of ‘civil society’, as a form of organization through which
ordinary people can mobilize their interests in opposition to those of the state,
or of larger global forces. Here, ‘community’ becomes an adjective describing
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types of local, collective agency, as in terms like ‘community activism’,

‘community politics’ and ‘community empowerment’. In this mode, ‘commu-
nities’, or those claiming to represent them, have mobilized to make all kinds
of demands of government, including campaigning for civil liberties (racial
equality, gay rights, etc.), for better services, for (or against) urban
development, and against the activities of multi-national companies. Although
this kind of community action can lead, as Richard Sennett (1986: 308
10)
points out, to insularity, parochialism, prejudice and antagonism to ‘outsiders’,
it is more often seen in a positive light insofar as it creates a mechanism
through which ordinary citizens can (collectively) confront the might of
‘faceless’ government.
Some advocates, however, see community as much more than simply a
sphere for democratic local action: for them it is also implies a moral choice. In
the United States, the Communitarian Network, founded by Amitai Etzioni in
1993, has been particularly influential in placing moral issues at the heart of
their ‘new communitarian’ agenda. According to the Communitarian Net-
work’s website (2003a), the organization was established to counteract a
perceived ‘breakdown in the moral fabric of society’ which it saw as the result
of ‘an excessive emphasis on individualism’, and in response to this it aims to
activate morally responsible community action as a way to chart ‘a middle way
between the politics of radical individualism and excessive statism’. In short,
the Network hopes to ‘rebuild America’s moral foundation’ by re-establishing
a more balanced relationship between individual rights and collective
responsibilities. This is to be achieved through advocating policies that will
strengthen the family unit, reactivate moral education in schools and
encourage volunteer participation to support the needy within communities.
The voluntary element is particularly important in this formulation as it is tied
to two central principles of communitarianism: first, that each individual has a
duty to contribute to the welfare of fellow citizens; and secondly, that local
voluntary action is always better than state intervention in solving local
problems (Communitarian Network 2003b).
Re-evaluating the relationship between welfare and community has also
been central to the rise of ‘New Labour’ in Britain. Under Tony Blair the
Labour Party claims to be pursuing a ‘third way’ between the state-centred
welfarism of ‘old Labour’ and the radical free-market individualism of
Thatcher’s Conservatives. According to Anthony Giddens (1998: 79), the
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 533

most prominent theorist of the Third Way, ‘The theme of ‘community’ is

fundamental to the new politics’. However, as he immediately clarifies, the
Third Way concept of ‘community’ does not infer a return to traditional
values, but rather a ‘practical means of furthering the social and material
refurbishment of neighbourhoods, towns and larger local areas’. In particular,
Giddens and New Labour have focused on the role of ‘community’ in
addressing the problems of urban decay and crime. In this context,
‘community participation’ is fostered and mobilized in order to assist the
police and other state agencies in achieving a return to civic order (ibid.: 86

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8). The Third Way conception of community differs from the ‘bottom up’
approach of the New Communitarians, suggesting something more like a form
of ‘partnership’ in which state agencies take the initiative to activate and direct
community action.
When it is invoked in this way, as part of a strategy to achieve particular
policy outcomes, ‘community’ becomes an integral component of the
governing process itself. It no longer stands in opposition to the state, but
instead is re-created as a willing partner in the government of itself. This
‘government through community’, as Nicholas Rose (1999: 175
6) terms it,
has emerged in recent decades through a process that has seen the growth of
professional and technical knowledge on the nature of communities being
linked to the administrative and managerial practices of government agencies.
A new cohort of specialists
community liaison officers, community
development officers, community police
have arisen to administer a range
of government programmes aimed at mobilizing the community to participate
in developing, managing and policing itself.
‘Government through community’, as Rose (1999) makes clear, is neither
necessarily good nor bad: one can only judge specific programmes on a case-
by-case basis. The significance of this development lies in the emergence of a
new meaning for ‘community’ which can no longer be viewed simply through
the rubric of ‘civil society’ nor seen as the natural home of ‘traditional moral
values’, but must instead be recognized as a component within flexible new
techniques of governance. In particular, ‘community’ has become a resource
for enabling, facilitating and implementing efficient and cost-effective
government. The more efficiency and cost become the primary rationale of
government, the more ‘community’ will be invoked as central to solving a
whole range of social problems.
In China, the discourse of ‘community’ that has appeared in recent years
turns upon a similar logic in seeking to develop more localized and economic
forms of governance, where citizens are mobilized and trained to govern
themselves. At the same time, this discourse embodies a substantial ethical
element, where good ‘community’ governance is seen as being dependent on
raising the moral ‘quality’ of urban citizens. Hence, the emerging conception
of ‘community’ in China appears to combine aspects of both New Commu-
nitarian and Third Way programmes.
 534 Economy and Society

Community in China

When the term ‘community’ reappeared with the rehabilitation of sociology in

mid-1980s China it was rapidly adopted by the Ministry of Civil Affairs
(MCA) and adapted to the service of government programmes. Official
appropriation of the term ensured that it was given a very specific definition.
According to MCA usage, ‘community’ would refer to the two lowest levels of
territorial division within the existing system of urban governance: namely, the
Street Office (jiedao banshichu ) and the Residents’ Committee (jumin
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weiyuanhui ) (Cui 1991: 9). Under this usage, community would not be
associated with natural social groupings or those formed by common identity,
but rather would correlate to existing grassroots administrative units
demarcated by the government.4 In China, then, the term ‘community’ was
confined within a narrow and specific definition underpinned by three key
characteristics: first, the nature and functions of community were to be
determined by government; second, the community would perform a largely
administrative role; and finally, each community would have a clearly
demarcated territorial space.
For the first decade after its emergence in the mid-1980s the new discourse
on community was principally concerned with the problem of ‘community
services’ (shequ fuwu ).5 The MCA had been responsible for the provision of a
range of welfare services since the 1950s
but only for the relatively small
minority of the population who did not receive support from a state-sector
work unit.6 The adoption of new terminology, however, signified more than
just a change in name: it was meant to symbolize the government’s intention to
widen both the scope of service provision and the target population. When
launching urban reform in 1984, the central government made clear that a key
objective was to relieve the work unit of its wide-ranging welfare functions.
Work units would then be free to pursue their core business while government
took over responsibility for the provision of community services to the entire
urban population (Chan 1993: 22). While this policy shift was seen as vital to
the survival of the state sector, it was also presented as a strategy to transform
what had hitherto been a fragmented, inconsistent and incomplete welfare
system
since different work units provided different levels and different
kinds of support
into one that would be universal, systematic and
comprehensive. In short, its advocates saw the development of community
services as an important element in the modernization and rationalization of
China’s urban society (e.g. Guo 1993: 18
23).
The shift to community services was not just about the separation of
enterprise from welfare or about government taking over social functions from
the work unit: the new strategy was also underpinned by a rationale to provide
more and better services to an urban population that was itself undergoing a
process of demographic transformation. In particular, welfare services had to
address changes in family composition and the ageing of the population.
Analysis of the urban population undertaken by the MCA showed a marked
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 535

reduction in the size of families with a trend towards two-generation families

where both parents work and also an increase in one-parent families as a result
of rising divorce rates. Under these conditions more families required support
in childcare and after-school care. Concomitantly, the ageing of the population
placed increasing demands on services for retirees and the elderly (Lei 2001:
96
100). Such was the shortage of provision in the latter area that expansion
of welfare services for senior citizens was made the central focus of community
service development (Guo 1993: 295
309).
Despite the rhetoric, efforts to establish new universal community services
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were unable to keep pace with the rapid transformation of urban society. Not
only did welfare authorities fail to meet the needs of the original target groups,
but also wide-ranging economic restructuring through the 1990s led to massive
lay-offs in the state sector and an urgent need for services aimed at assisting
the increasing number of unemployed urban residents (Solinger 2002). The
concurrent relaxation of former controls on population movement saw large
influxes of rural residents into urban areas in search of employment, placing
further pressure on urban welfare services as well as raising new challenges for
policing and the implementation of family planning. In addition to the
problem of providing community services for an increasingly diverse and more
mobile urban population, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
were anxious, in the wake of the opposition movement of 1989, to rebuild
closer links amongst urban residents. Under Jiang Zemin’s leadership (1989

2002), campaigns for ‘Party building’ were pursued at all levels, but especially
at the grassroots of urban society. The rise of Falun Gong, and the surprising
level of resistance to its subsequent banning in 1999, only heightened the
perception amongst China’s authorities that they had to pay more attention to
bolstering institutions of local governance. The fact that a supposedly ‘evil and
dangerous cult’ like Falun Gong could have developed a complex organiza-
tional structure and a massive following in a relatively short space of time
(Tong 2002) seemed, to some amongst China’s leadership, symptomatic of a
decline both in moral standards as well as the state’s ability to govern
effectively.
Faced with these dilemmas the central government decided to expand the
scope of community work in order to strengthen the entire grassroots
organizational infrastructure. The original idea of ‘community services’ has
given way to the broader concept of ‘community building’ (shequ jianshe ).
Within this new paradigm, the concept of ‘community’ is no longer confined
solely to the issue of service and welfare provision, but is broadened to include
culture, health, environment, education, morality, policing, grassroots democ-
racy and ‘Party building’ (Cui 1991: 9). Under this new policy initiative, the
community is expected to become a very specific form of grassroots
organization; each community will have a distinct territory and be run by a
team of officials employing a standardized repertoire of bureaucratic
procedures.
 536 Economy and Society

After a period of experimentation in the second half of the 1990s7, the MCA
decided to promote one basic organizational model of community for
implementation throughout the nation’s cities. In late 2000, the new blueprint
(MCA 2000) was published along with an endorsement from the CCP Central
Committee and the State Council. This document describes ‘community
building’ as ‘a crucial tool in national efforts to promote social development, to
raise living standards, to expand grass roots democracy and to maintain urban
stability’ (ibid.). Since its release, major efforts have been undertaken by
authorities in most of China’s cities to implement and popularize the
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programme of ‘community building’. While it is too early to make definitive

conclusions as to the long-term effects of this new policy, it is clear that the
objective is to carry out a major reorganization and re-ordering of urban
society. In this respect, the potential implications are significant.
The 2000 document defines community as: ‘a social collective formed by
people who reside within a defined and bounded district’ (ibid.: 3), while the
territory of the community is designated as ‘the area under the jurisdiction of
the enlarged Residents’ Committee’. From this explanation it is apparent that
the definition of ‘community’ has narrowed even further
it no longer
includes the Street Office but is now seen as corresponding to the Residents’
Committee (RC) alone. Given this shift in definition it might seem obvious to
interpret ‘community building’ as simply an extension of the RC system that
was established in the 1950s.8 Yet, if we look more closely at the literature, we
find a somewhat different conclusion is warranted.
The RC system was originally established along with the Street Office as a
stopgap measure to organize urban residents who did not yet belong to a work
unit. Throughout the Maoist period (1949
76), the RC remained on the
periphery of urban life and when the reform era was launched in December
1978, over 95 per cent of urban workers belonged to state or collective-owned
work units. By 1992, this figure was still over 90 per cent, indicating that the
work unit system continued to dominate the organization of urban life for the
first decade and a half of the reform period (Bray 2005: 157
93). It was only in
the second half of the 1990s that the role of the work unit declined rapidly as
Premier Zhu Rongji’s radical strategies to restructure the state sector began to
take effect. It is no coincidence that this period of dramatic socio-economic
change also saw the emergence of the community as a potential new site for
governmental intervention.
The contemporary concept of community thus arose not as a natural
expansion of the RC and Street Office systems, but rather in response to the
collapse of the work unit system. This point is emphasized repeatedly in the
Chinese literature. In the 2000 MCA document, for example, the historical
necessity for ‘community building’ is attributed to two principle factors: first,
the breakdown of the work unit system; and secondly, the ‘flood’ of migrant
rural workers into the cities. The document further explains that these
developments demand the establishment of a new management system based
on the community (MCA 2000: 4). Conversely, the literature on the RC system
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 537

portrays this institution as historically weak, poorly funded, inadequately

staffed and generally ineffectual
certainly in no fit state to take over the
numerous social and political roles previously performed by the work unit
(Chan 1993: 167
76). Even the attempts to revitalize the RCs during the
1990s, as described by Read (2000), have now clearly been overtaken by the
decision to ‘build communities ’. In addition, the documentary literature
repeatedly links ‘community building’ with ‘Party building’ and can be seen
in this context as part of the much wider project initiated by Jiang Zemin, to
strengthen the CCP at the grassroots. I therefore conclude that the term
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community has been adopted within China to designate a largely new form of
urban institution, notwithstanding some superficial connections to the RC
system, and that its origins are directly attributable to the decline of the work
unit system, the increase of rural-to-urban migration and the general
diversification and fragmentation of city life. In the face of these numerous
challenges, China’s authorities hope that ‘community building’ will provide the
foundation for re-incorporating the urban population within a manageable
system of local governance.

The Shenyang model of ‘community building’

In the second half of the 1990s, Shenyang City in China’s Northeast ‘rust belt’
was one of a number of cities to develop experimental models of community
organization. As a major centre of heavy industry under the planned economy,
Shenyang suffered more than most as a result of state-sector restructuring. Its
high rates of state-owned enterprise bankruptcy, redundancy and unemploy-
ment, no doubt encouraged City officials to explore new strategies to remedy
the effects of this dramatic socio-economic rupture. The ‘Shenyang Model’
quickly became nationally renowned, and when the MCA’s 2000 document was
released it became obvious that this model had greatly influenced the final
blueprint for ‘community building’ nationwide.
Since the inception of ‘community building’ in China, one of the key
national debates has concerned the problem of scale
how large should a
community be? Authorities in Shenyang came to the dual conclusion that
existing RCs were too small to establish viable ‘economies of scale’, and the
territory of the Street Office was too large to be conducive to grassroots
organization. To overcome this problem, they decided to create new ‘enlarged’
RCs to form the basis of the new community organization. According to
national legislation promulgated in 1989, RCs should consist of 100 to 700
households9, but in Shenyang it was decided that a scale of 1,000 to 1,500
households would better serve contemporary circumstances, especially since
the majority of people now lived in high-rise apartment blocks. In the Tiexi
District of Shenyang
the heart of the city’s old heavy industry sector
the
original 445 RCs with an average size of 535 households or 1,686 people, were
reorganized into 190 communities averaging 1,255 households or 3,949 people
 538 Economy and Society

(Shenyang shequ jianshe lingdao xiaozu 1999: 60
1). After implementing the
enlargement programme, the new organizations in Shenyang were no longer
referred to as ‘residents committees’, but were instead called ‘community
management committees’ (shequ guanli weiyuanhui ). Strictly speaking this
terminology was illegal, since neither the Constitution, which mentions RCs,
nor the 1989 legislation had yet been amended. In their 2000 document the
MCA attempts to redress this problem by combining the two terms, referring
to the new organizations as ‘community residents’ committees’ (shequ jumin
weiyuanhui ) (MCA 2000: 10).
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Another issue that received much attention in Shenyang was the question of
how to determine boundaries for each new community. On this point all the
documents emphasize the need to create communities that appeared ‘natural’,
so that residents would feel a sense of belonging to the community and would
more readily identify with its objectives. If such feelings could be fostered it
was believed that higher levels of social cohesion and more effective
governance could be achieved (Shenyang shequ jianshe lingdao xiaozu 1999:
101
2). Based on this rationale, three basic types of community were
developed corresponding to different forms of urban space: (1) work unit
type
based on a single work unit compound; (2) compound type
centred
on a single residential compound (xiaoqu ); and (3) block style
defined by an
urban block bounded by major roads (ibid.: 61, 149). In urban China, the vast
majority of housing is enclosed within walled compounds of one sort or
another. Larger work units usually had their own housing estates, either within
the same compound as the workplace (factory, school, office, etc.) or in an
adjacent residential compound (Bray 2005). With the privatization and
commercialization of the housing industry in the 1990s, the link between
work unit and housing provision was largely severed. Nevertheless, property
developers have continued the tradition, invariably enclosing each new housing
estate within a high wall. Even the ‘block-type’ community is usually
constituted by a number of smaller enclosed compounds. Where the newly
demarcated community lies entirely within a single compound its ‘naturalness’
is no doubt enhanced by the spatial configuration. However, when a community
is spread across several walled compounds it is clearly more difficult to foster a
sense of belonging to a common social unit.10
The new community organization is supposed to inherit all the infrastructure
and equipment (office space, furniture, tools, etc.) from the RCs it replaces,
but because the shift to community is primarily about expanding the scope and
capabilities of grassroots organization, it also requires considerable new
investment in community infrastructure. In Shenyang, the City and District
governments allotted specific funding to construct new buildings, or renovate
old buildings for the use of the community organizations (Shenyang shequ
jianshe lingdao xiaozu 1999: 17, 26). The new ‘community activity centres’
(shequ huodong zhongxin ) include office space for the management committee,
enquiry counters, meeting rooms, a police post and other areas for community
activities (exercise classes, social events, and so forth). Moreover, regulations
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 539

passed by the City Government require developers to provide integrated

community facilities within all new residential complexes.11 In the up-market
commercial housing developments, many services that would otherwise be the
responsibility of the community organization are instead undertaken by
professional property management companies, which levee monthly service
fees from all residents. Although these companies are also supposed to
facilitate other aspects of ‘community building’ (political, social and cultural),
community organizational structures often remain weak or even non-existent
due to lack of interest amongst the more affluent sections of the population
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(Tomba 2004: 1
26).

In Shenyang the concept of ‘community building’ has been interpreted in a
remarkably literal sense: it is as much about constructing new forms of physical
space as it is about building new kinds of organization. The ‘community
centres’ have been erected as close as possible to the centre of the community
territory that they serve. This appears to have been a deliberate spatial strategy
to symbolize the new urban social order. The message it imparts is that the
community organization should be the locus of local urban life. This spatial re-
formation bolsters the larger project to establish a new foundation for urban
identity; confronted on a daily basis with the physical presence of the
‘community centre’, the resident is explicitly encouraged to identify with the
new organization that it represents. In this way, the displacement of the work
unit as the basis of urban society is made manifest through a physical re-
ordering of the urban environment.
If the ‘community centre’ announces the presence of the new order, then, it is
the professional community officers located within the centre, who are charged
with bringing that order to fruition. The Shenyang authorities have devoted
considerable attention to the issue of personnel. In contrast to the past, when
the RCs were staffed by volunteers (usually retirees and predominantly elderly
women), the new community organizations are run by full-time salaried
officials. Most of the new cadres have been recruited from amongst Party and
Trade Union officials made redundant during the recent restructuring of the
state sector.12 The criteria used in Shenyang to select new staff include the
following: at least 50 per cent should be CCP members; they should be no
more than 50 years old; have high levels of political and cultural attainment;
have appropriate management experience; have previous experience in ‘mass
line work’;13 have strong organizational instincts; and be committed to the
concept of ‘community building’ (Shenyang shequ jianshe lingdao xiaozu 1999:
15, 61). Hence, the shift from the RCs to community has seen the
professionalization of community work as younger, better-educated and
politically seasoned cadres take over from the elderly amateurs of the past.
This shift reflects the increased status and complexity of the new organiza-
tions.
The responsibilities now delegated to the community are numerous, but can
be divided into five broad areas of activity. First, it is expected to provide a
range of services to the resident population. This work focuses on the various
 540 Economy and Society

groups within the community who need special care: the elderly, the sick, the
disabled, those with financial difficulties, the unemployed and the laid-off
workers. Community cadres are responsible for administering the state’s
guarantee to provide a basic living allowance to those who have no other means
of support. Moreover, given the high rates of unemployment and redundancy
in Shenyang, a significant component of the cadres’ day-to-day work is taken
up with the provision of financial aid and attempts to help the jobless find new
employment. In addition to welfare, the community is expected to manage a
range of other services for the benefit of the general population
convenience
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stores, bicycle repair stands, childcare, legal advice, and so forth. These kinds
of undertakings can also offer a source of extra income to support community
administration and activities.
Secondly, the community is charged with responsibility for managing aspects
of urban healthcare and sanitation. Many communities have their own clinics,
others arrange consultations with doctors, and most organize periodic
information sessions on various aspects of personal and public health. In
times of crisis, such as the SARS outbreak of 2003, the community is
mobilized to implement emergency prevention methods as directed by national
authorities. They are also required to administer state family planning policies,
which include very close monitoring of contraception amongst all women of
childbearing age, as well as the registration and reporting of all births within
their territory. Additionally, community cadres manage every-day sanitation
work, garbage removal and general maintenance of the community environ-
ment
although staff of the property management company in most instances
carries out the actual work.
Thirdly, the community is expected to organize a wide range of educational
and cultural programmes. Educational work mostly centres on the dissemina-
tion of CCP government policy and is referred to variously as ‘socialist
education’ or ‘civilized citizen quality education’ (wenming shimin suzhi jiaoyu ).
Cultural events are arranged on national holidays and other significant
occasions. Fourthly, the community plays an important role in the local
coordination of security work. In this area the cadres work closely with local
police and the security guards of neighbouring work units and residential
compounds. This work includes arranging security patrols of the entire
community territory, disseminating information on household security, mon-
itoring the behaviour of residents who have been in trouble previously,
ensuring all residents are registered with the police, solving disputes amongst
residents and mobilizing volunteers to establish ‘neighbourhood watch’
networks (ibid.: 30
1).
Finally, the community is required to coordinate and liaise between various
other organizations. Most importantly, it takes direction from the local Street
Office of the District Government and from the local Party organization. If the
community contains enough Party members it is required to establish its own
CCP branch with the head of the community committee simultaneously acting
as Party branch secretary (ibid.: 14).14 The community also liaises closely with
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 541

any work units and other businesses located within its territory, with the
local property management company, with the homeowners’ committee
(yezhu weiyuanhui ), with local People’s Congress delegates and with any other
official organization that wishes to make contact with the local population
(ibid.: 21
3).
The preceding outline demonstrates that the duties of the community cover a
wide range of responsibilities, and since each community is staffed with only
three to six full-time cadres (depending on population), managing this heavy
workload is an onerous undertaking. To address the logistical challenges,
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cadres are encouraged to mobilize volunteers from within the local residential
population to assist in the day-to-day work of community governance. This
strategy accords closely to the guiding principles that underpin ‘community
building’ and which derive in part from the Maoist traditions of mass
participation and self-help. Like the RC, the community is officially defined as
a ‘mass organization’15; so one of the main duties for the cadres is to mobilize
‘the masses’ to participate. At the heart of the volunteer system is a corps of
‘activists’ (often Party members) organized into a hierarchical system based on
the spatial arrangement of the community population: if the community has
more than one residential compound then each has a designated ‘compound
leader’; each separate apartment block inside the compound, in turn, has a
volunteer ‘building leader’; while within each building several ‘section’ or
‘floor’ leaders will be assigned. Together these volunteer activists provide a
comprehensive network for ensuring that all aspects of community life are kept
under close scrutiny and that all the vital daily maintenance and security work
is seen to. It is the volunteer network that links the community population to
the formal organizational structure and binds its territory into one seamless
social unit.
Although the relationship between community cadres and the residential
population is influenced by the CCP traditions of ‘mass-line’ leadership, other
concepts, such as the ‘social contract’ or ‘pact’, are utilized to formalize the
respective roles of cadres and residents. In Shenyang, the ‘community pact’ sets
out both the professional obligations of the community organization as well as
the civic and ethical responsibilities of the resident. The ‘pact’ adopted in the
Tiexi District stipulates the respective duties of the community and residents in
the following way:
The community promises to:

1. Perform its duties, provide services, be responsive, engage in democratic

discussion of business and accept supervision.
2. Reflect residents’ ideas and demands; provide timely feedback and respond
to every matter.
3. Deal promptly with residents’ affairs; where possible provide same-day
service.
 542 Economy and Society

4. Assist retrenched workers to find new employment, manage the basic

livelihood allowance for residents in a transparent and fair manner.
5. During holiday periods visit the families of army personnel and revolu-
tionary martyrs, the disabled, the elderly without families, households with
special difficulties and those with serious illness.
6. Organize volunteers’ activity days and arrange cultural entertainment on all
major festival days.
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The resident promises to:

1. Respond to the call of the community and to enthusiastically participate in

community building.
2. Refrain from illegal or criminal activities such as viewing pornography,
gambling or drug-taking.
3. Practice family planning, implement birth-control measures and not to
conceive any births outside of the plan.
4. Take care of the gardens and public facilities.
5. Not clutter the yard and corridors with junk or litter.
6. Speak in a civilized manner, maintain a harmonious family and avoid
disputes with neighbours.
7. Reform habits and customs and refrain from the practice of feudal
superstitions.

(Shenyangshi tiexiqu 2000, trans. David Bray)

All members of the community are issued with a handbook containing the ‘pact’
and other regulations concerning the structure and organization of community
work, as well as a ‘resident’s service card’ listing the various services that are
offered by the community and the telephone numbers of the responsible staff
member. Most of this information is also on display both in the community
centre and on public notice boards throughout the community’s territory. From
close reading of this information it appears that the point is not simply to
inform residents of the services they can now access, but more importantly to
apprise them of the structures, the processes, the procedures and the ethical
standards by which the community is supposed to operate. Where the physical
presence of the community centre announces the arrival of the community
organization, the super-abundance of information lends weight to its
legitimacy through mapping-out the contours of the new social order and
providing clearly articulated norms for the behaviour of both residents and
cadres.
As the community becomes increasingly saturated with rules, guidelines,
processes and standards, so its capacity for self-governance is apparently
enhanced. Initially there is a steep learning curve as both cadres and residents
work to assimilate the concepts of ‘community building’. Cadres are put
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 543

through training programmes organized by the City or District authorities

where they receive a ‘crash course’ in community work. Specialist training
manuals have been produced by the MCA for this purpose and are studied in
combination with collections of relevant national and local policy documents.
The manuals cover the broader conceptual issues under three categories:
Community Self-governance; Community Services; and The Relationship
between Government and Community (Chen 2004; Hu 2004; Li 2004).
Moreover, there is a constant flow of documents from District government to
the community and regular meetings for community cadres to attend on a
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whole range of specific issues. But in terms of understanding how the role of
the community is understood and how its place within the wider political
system is conceived, we need to focus on the discourse relating to the notion of
‘self-governance’ in China.

Community (self-)governance in China

The idea of self-governance (zizhi ) is a very strong theme running through

both the MCA literature and the local Shenyang documents; and while
emphasis on this term may seem somewhat misleading, given the degree to
which the whole programme of ‘community building’ has been directed from
above, it is worthwhile attempting to unpack what ‘self-governance’ may
actually mean within this context. To begin with, ‘self-governance’ is utilized
in a largely formulaic sense to simply designate an arena of organization that
lies outside of the formal structures of government. Since the establishment of
the PRC in 1949, the lowest level of formal urban government has been the
District. Below that level, the sub-District office (or Street Office) has
operated as simply an outpost of the District Government, while the
Residents’ Committee was always defined as a ‘self-governing’ ‘mass
organization’, regardless of how closely it was controlled by the District or
Street Office. Thus, despite the high degree of government involvement in the
development and promotion of ‘community building’, the community is still
defined organizationally as ‘self-governing’.
Beyond this formal distinction between ‘government’ and ‘mass organiza-
tion’, however, there is a more substantive sense in which ‘self-governance’ is
also used to refer to the actual operational methods employed within the
community. Used in this context, the term does not imply anything like
‘absolute autonomy’, but rather a more limited form of ‘self-governance’ in
which the community is expected to manage its own affairs within the
operational parameters established by government authorities. This is why I
disagree with those commentators who translate the Chinese term zizhi as
‘autonomy’: the term is made up of two characters: zi simply means ‘self ’ or
‘oneself ’, while zhi means ‘to rule’ or ‘to govern’. One component of this
mode of ‘self-governance’ is the promotion of democratic methods for the
selection of management committees and for internal decision-making. In
 544 Economy and Society

Shenyang and elsewhere, an electoral system has been implemented to select

cadres and to provide a mechanism through which those who do not meet the
expectations of community residents may be voted out of office at the end of
their term (three years), or in cases of misbehaviour or incompetence, before
the end of the full term.
In addition to outlining the democratic processes to be followed within
community governance, the literature delineates the scope of ‘self-governance’
more specifically through sub-dividing it into three categories known as the
‘three selfs’: self-management, self-education, and self-service (Chen 2004:
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26
8). Self-management concerns the way in which the community is

organized internally and implies that it is expected to mobilize itself (with
the cadres taking a lead role) to create its own management structures

committees, sub-committees and so on
that are capable of carrying out the
various tasks, for example, security, sanitation, and cultural events, assigned to
it. The concepts of self-education and self-service demand that the community
rely substantially on its own resources
human as well as material
in
pursuing the intellectual, spiritual and economic improvement of its popula-
tion.16 Insofar as local problems begin to be solved by local cadres and residents
working together as a community, the need for intervention from higher levels of
government is forestalled and practical efficiencies are achieved.
One of the principle reasons underlying the move to ‘build communities ’ has
been the failure of the Chinese government to meet the demand for social
services brought about by the rapid socio-economic transformation of urban
China since the mid-1980s: authorities hope that government shortfall can be
supplemented through local self-help. As the concept of ‘community building’
developed, however, the notion of ‘shortfall’ has extended from the purely
economic realm to encompass the moral and the spiritual as well. The
community is charged not only with responsibility for looking after residents
with special economic needs, but also with lifting moral and educational
standards, particularly amongst those sections of the population that are seen
as problematic, such as migrant labourers, petty criminals, delinquents, and the
unemployed. In taking on this kind of role, the community has been
increasingly mobilized as a player in the broader national campaigns to raise
the overall ‘quality’ (suzhi ) of the population. But, more significantly, the
articulation of this role depends on securing a tight conceptual link between
the notions of moral quality and self-governance. With this ethical overlay, it
might be more useful to think of zizhi as ‘governing the self ’ in the
Foucaultian sense (Foucault 1978: 87), rather than merely as ‘self-governance’;
with the rider that the ‘self ’ is understood as a collective not as an individual
‘self ’ in this specific context.
Ethical training within the community in present-day China is built upon
models established through national campaigns for promoting ‘spiritual
civilization’. Such campaigns centre on the periodic assessment of individuals
and households according to specific criteria culminating in the award of prizes
or the confirmation of ‘civilized’ status. To be declared a ‘five-good civilized
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 545

household’ (wuhao wenming jiating ), for example, a family has to be able to

demonstrate that its members: are patriotic, law-abiding and public spirited;
are keen to improve themselves through study and devoted to their jobs;
observe equality between the genders, respect the elderly and cherish the
young; reject old customs and practice family planning; and are industrious
and thrifty in household management and active in protecting the environ-
ment.17 In Wuhan, moral accounting has been taken to another level in recent
years with the establishment of ‘citizen morality files’ (gongmin daode dang’an )
for each individual community resident. Under this system ‘moral deeds’ are
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recorded under 10 separate categories including (in addition to those

mentioned above) being polite and civilized, honest and trustworthy, helping
others and demonstrating self respect. Once each year, the ‘moral deeds’ are
added up and awards are distributed to those individuals with the most moral
points.18
The implementation of various schemes for moral accounting demonstrate
that the community is far from a seamless whole, because it invokes a range of
dividing practices that publicly distinguish between the moral and the amoral,
the fit and the unfit or, as it is often expressed in China, between those of high
‘quality’ and those of low ‘quality’. Those identified as defective in moral
attributes are, by extension, deemed unable or unfit to participate in self-
governance: instead, they become the objects of governance as the community
deploys its collective resources to educate, guide and, if warranted, monitor and
control them. In important ways, these dividing practices strengthen rather
than weaken the role of community : not only because they provide a target for
organized normative intervention, a rallying point for collective mobilization;
but more importantly because by their very existence the low ‘quality’ subject
justifies the necessity for local governance
for without the civilizing influence
of community, there is nothing to act as a bulwark against moral degeneration.
Self governance in this context does not imply any inherent equality amongst
citizens in terms of the right to govern, but rather turns on a moral division
between those fit to govern and those fit only to be governed.

Conclusions: governing through community in China

In governing their benighted neighbours, as well as themselves, citizens of

‘quality’ relieve China’s governmental authorities of a considerable burden.
This is the most significant outcome of the entire ‘community building’
programme in urban China. Through making this mode of ethically informed
‘government of the self ’ possible (or, at least, thinkable), it provides a
framework and a rationale for the emergence of a far-reaching system of
‘governance through community’. While it bears some resemblance to
community-focused forms of governance in Britain and elsewhere, China’s
model has a number of distinguishing features: most notably, the degree to
which the idea of ‘community’ itself has been institutionalized. Building on
 546 Economy and Society

pre-existing grassroots organizational structures in urban China, the Resi-

dents’ Committee and the local Party Branch, in particular, the community has
been endowed with a clearly enunciated institutional identity: it has a defined
territory and population, it is staffed by a corps of professional cadres trained
in the methods of ‘community building’, has access to a range of financial,
material and cultural resources to support its activities and is empowered to
invoke a wide but specific repertoire of governmental interventions. In this
respect, it could be said to resemble an entire new level of local government.
At the same time, much of the day-to-day work of the community depends
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on the active participation of numerous unpaid volunteers mobilized from

amongst the local population. Motivated, apparently, through appeals to their
sense of moral duty, commitment to neighbourliness and feelings of
community pride, they willingly take on the challenging tasks of community
(self) governance. As local activists, the volunteers become exemplary models
for training the rest of the population in the arts of governing the communal
self. Although underpinned by a different moral framework, this mode of
community-focused, ethically informed self-help bears some resemblance to
the programme enunciated by the New Communitarians in the United States.
In short, ‘community building’ in urban China presents a hybrid combina-
tion of strategies for community governance; it combines some fairly direct
modes of governmental intervention, with a well-developed system of
voluntary service and a commitment to the efficacy of community as an agent
for moral improvement. If ‘community building’ is even partly successful, then,
it will reduce the future costs of government considerably. Moreover, it may
partially alleviate the dangerous dislocations, ruptures and disparities that
currently threaten to undermine the remaining vestiges of state legitimacy in
present-day China.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Australian Research Council,
Asia-Pacific Futures Network, China Node Workshop, hosted by the University of
Technology, Sydney, 9 December 2005. I would like to thank workshop participants for
many helpful and insightful comments, especially Gary Sigley, Tamara Jacka, Luigi
Tomba and designated ‘discussant’ Barry Hindess. Thanks also to Dorothy Solinger for
comments on an earlier written version and to Elaine Jeffreys for many wise editorial
interventions during the latter stages.
2 The discipline of sociology was officially banned in China from 1952 to around 1979
as it was considered to be anti-socialist. It was revived in the early 1980s in response to
Deng Xiaoping’s call for ‘freeing the mind’ and for academics to ‘seek truth from fact’.
China’s most well-known, surviving sociologist, Fei Xiaotong, was rehabilitated to
direct the revival of sociology, both as a research discipline and as subject taught in the
Universities.
3 I visited Shenyang in September 2001 and collected further materials on the
‘Shenyang Model’ during a subsequent research visit to the Ministry of Civil Affairs in
Beijing in 2004.
 David Bray: Building ‘Community’ 547

4 Throughout the remainder of this paper I use the italics to indicate this very specific
interpretation of ‘community’.
5 The first national conference on Community Services was held in Wuhan in 1987
(Guo 1993: 2).
6 Under the model of economic planning adopted in China, the workplace became the
basic unit of urban social, economic and political life. Each ‘work unit’ (or danwei )
provided its members with a range of benefits including healthcare, retirement pensions
and other forms of social welfare. In the mid-1980s, when urban reform began, over 90
per cent of the urban workforce belonged to a work unit (Bray 2005).
7 Through the 1990s the MCA promoted the concept of community and encouraged
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city and district governments to undertake experiments and trials to develop practical
methods for the implementation of ‘community building’. Cities such as Qingdao,
Shijiazhuang, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenyang have been
particularly prominent in these developments. The collection edited by Ma Xueli and
Zhang Xiulan (2001) includes primary documents as well as analysis of most of these
regional experiments.
8 RCs were established in law in 1954. For a recent overview of the history and role of
RCs see Read (2000).
9 This law was an attempt to standardize grassroots governance throughout urban
China and led to RC type organizations, often known as ‘staff and family committees’
(zhigong jiashu weiyuanhui ) being established within every work unit. Although they were
in theory self-governing ‘mass organizations’, in fact they remained closely under the
control of the work unit within which they were located. (Bai Yihua and Ma Xueli 1990).
10 A community I visited in Wuhan is facing great obstacles in bringing together the
two compounds it administers. One strategy pursued by the community leaders was to
propose making a gate between the two compounds. Not only would this facilitate
interaction between the two compounds, it would also greatly shorten the route for
residents of the larger compound to get to the local shops and bus stop. Residents of the
smaller compound, however, strongly opposed the gate because they worried it would
lead to increased noise levels and to an influx of ‘strangers’ passing through their space.
In addition to the general inconvenience, they felt that this development could also lead
to a fall in property values.
11 In the course of recent field trips to Shenyang, Beijing, Wuhan, Jinan, and
Shanghai, I have visited many purpose built ‘community activity centres’ including
several that are integrated into new residential developments.
12 Strictly speaking community staff are not state cadres because they are not paid
cadre wages and their posts are not listed on the state’s official organizational charts.
Nevertheless, they are habitually referred to as ‘cadres’ (or grassroots cadres, jiceng
ganbu ) both by local government officials and local community residents. I will,
therefore, adopt this usage.
13 ‘The mass line’ was a concept developed by Mao from the mid-1930s and became
the key operational creed of the CCP. It implied two basic principles of leadership: local
leaders had to be close to and responsive to ‘the masses’; and they had to use their own
initiative to adapt general policy to local circumstances. In broader strategic terms ‘the
mass line’ was designed to facilitate the mobilization of the population for revolutionary
struggle, while at the same time attempting to counter the tendency for a revolutionary
Party to become too centralized and overly bureaucratic. After the foundation of the
People’s Republic of China in 1949, the concept was converted from a revolutionary
strategy to a principle of socialist government. Local level cadres were all trained in the
techniques of ‘mass line work’.
14 All CCP members must register with the Party branch of the community within
which they reside, even if their primary Party affiliation is with the Party branch at their
workplace. Several informants suggested to me that this policy has been implemented
 548 Economy and Society

in order to strengthen Party discipline
Party members are now under Party
jurisdiction at home as well as at work. Certainly, at one ‘community centre’ I observed a
large notice board on public display that listed the names and residential locations of all
Party members who lived within that community.
15 A range of organizations, such as trade unions, the Women’s Federation, the
Communist Youth League and residents’ committees, that were not officially part of the
formal government system were referred to as ‘mass organizations’. In theory, they were
supposed to be organized by and for ‘the masses’ and function as ‘self-governing’
organizations. In practice, they operated under fairly close CCP supervision as
mechanisms for mobilizing various sections of the population to participate in the
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implementation of government policy.

16 What is meant by ‘education’ in this context falls into three categories: first,
knowledge of public affairs including fields like the law, public health and hygiene, and
government policy; secondly, practical know-how in everyday skills like cooking, raising
children, and handicrafts; and thirdly, morality. It is very likely any given community can
find ‘experts’ either from amongst its own residential population or from neighbouring
communities or from nearby hospitals and police stations, for example, to provide classes
on such topics.
17 The Women’s Federation has been running ‘Five-good Household’ campaigns
since the 1950s, but the concept was revamped in 1996. As part of this revamping, the
five criteria for judgement were updated, the term ‘civilized ’ was added to the
formulation and a ‘Five-good Civilized Household’ National Coordination Group was
established to oversee implementation of the programme. In urban China, practical
management of the programme
publicity, assessment of households and distribution
of awards
is delegated to the community (Liu 2003).
18 Based on original documents sighted during fieldwork in Qingshan District,
Wuhan, January 2006.

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David Bray holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science and Chinese, and a PhD in
Political Science, both from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His
studies have included more than three years in China spent variously at
Shandong Teachers’ University, Beijing Language Institute, Beijing Uni-
versity and the Chinese University of Politics and Law. He has taught
at RMIT and Monash University (both in Melbourne, Australia) and at
Cambridge University (UK). He currently lectures in Chinese Studies at the
University of Sydney (Australia). He is the author of Social Space and
Governance in Urban China: the Danwei System from Origins to Reform
(Stanford, 2005). His current research is on contemporary developments in
urban governance and urban spatial transformation in China.