‘Community construction’ is the government’s watchword for coping with the social transformation of Chinese cities. Nick Young and Tina Qian visited Ningbo, where local authorities are working with a Chinese NGO to invest the phrase with real meaning, and to give ordinary citizens a somewhat greater role in community development.
On a weekday morning in the prosperous coastal city of Ningbo, thirty elderly residents of a relatively low-income neighbourhood are gathered in the sunny atrium of the Xujiachao (徐家漕) Neighbourhood Centre, listening to a volunteer teacher read newspaper articles aloud in the local, Zhejiang dialect. In a community diner downstairs the pensioners can buy a hearty meal for as little as one yuan (USD 12 cents), and an air-conditioned common room is also set aside for them to meet, chat and play mah jong.
These services are laid on by the Xujiachao Neighbourhood Committee which, like thousands of others across China, is following central government orders to engage in ‘community construction’ (社区建设). Established by Mao Zedong, these neighbourhood committees once served to keep an eye on the urban masses and ensure compliance with the Communist Party line. While still playing this role, the committees are now under pressure to adapt to the breathtaking changes that have overtaken urban China—including both the influx of rural migrants and the yawning service gaps left by the collapse of state enterprises that, in Mao’s original plan, offered comprehensive, cradle-to-grave care for their workers.
Neighbourhood committees in many cities have responded by providing community services for their catchments of around 2,000 households each. In Xujiachao ’s case there is a small yet significant difference. Here, the committee has not just rolled out services at the behest of higher administrative levels. Instead, it first asked the residents what kind of service they wanted.
This small step towards more responsive local government has been piloted with the aid of a non-governmental organisation, Community Action, based in Beijing. Two years ago, the government of Ningbo’s central Haishu District invited the group to give training and consultancy support to Wangchun (望春) Street Affairs Office, which is responsible for overseeing eight of the District’s 63 urban neighbourhoods. (See text box, at the end of this article, on the city’s administrative structure)
Wangchun’s neighbourhoods range from salubrious Tianyi Jiayuan(天一家园), where tennis courts are laid out among private apartments costing CNY 1.5 million (USD 180,000) apiece, to Yizhan (驿站) neighbourhood’s bleak landscape of concrete tenements providing temporary housing for 1,060 rural families from villages swallowed up by recent urban growth. After consultation with residents, the committees in these diverse neighbourhoods are offering services that range from holding opera singing contests in the rich areas to teaching the former peasants how to use elevators and ATM machines as part of a crash course in modern city life.
One size does not fit all
Ningbo prides itself as ‘a place of fish and rice’—the Chinese variant of a ‘land of milk and honey.’ Historically affluent, the city, like most of surrounding Zhejiang Province, rapidly re-emerged during the ‘reform and opening’ era as a booming trade and manufacturing centre with a thriving private sector. In 2005, GDP per capita in the city reached CNY 18,782 (USD 4,788).
This leaves the city government well endowed by Chinese standards, and able to invest substantial sums in its neighbourhoods. Recently, the word went down from the city government that every neighbourhood must establish a community library, with a surface area of at least 200m2, and a collection of 3,000 prescribed books and 100 newspaper and magazine titles. Neighbourhoods are also expected to maintain an indoor exercise area of specified dimensions, fitted with modern exercise machines, and a standardised training room with desks ranged in front of a podium and Communist Party icons.
But, points out Community Action’s founder and driving force, Ms. Song Qinghua (宋庆华), such uniform provision presupposes that every neighbourhood has identical needs, yet this is simply not so. For example, she says, in richer neighbourhoods families have their own books at home, and turnover in the library is negligible. (In upmarket Tianyi Jiayuan, indeed, we found the library reading desks had been moved aside to make way for ballroom dancing classes.) Government money, argues Song, would be better spent meeting needs identified by the residents themselves.
In 2005 the city government allocated Wangchun Street Affairs Office CNY 130,000 (USD 16,250) per thousand households in its catchment, according to the office’s Deputy Director, Yang Aiping ( ). This, she says, is above the national average of CNY 100,000 per thousand households. Although most of the budget is used to cover staff salaries, the Street Affairs Office put aside CNY 50,000 (USD 6,250) for a small projects fund, to which neighbourhoods can apply. Proposing, designing and implementing small but innovative service projects is supposed to encourage a reversal of the neighbourhood committees’ traditional, ‘top-down’ working style.
New model services
Xujiachao’s regular newspaper reading sessions are one such innovation, costing no more than the volunteer’s bus fare. The sessions have proved popular because older residents are lonely at home, often have failing eyesight, and enjoy the chance to socialise, according to Le Yi (乐怡), who is both Director and Communist Party Secretary of the Xujiachao Neighbourhood Committee.
The committees have an elected Director, who is unpaid, a Party Secretary, appointed and paid CNY 1,700 per month by the Party, and an Office Head appointed and paid CNY 1,600 per month by the local government, who leads a team of 6-7 other paid staff. Very often, says Yang Aiping, either the Party Secretary or the Office Head are elected to the post of Director.
“I have got to know a lot of people here and, apart from reading the papers twice a week, we now go out for walks in the evenings and do tai qi together” says Grandma Liu (刘), 86. Another member of the reading group points out that “If someone doesn’t turn up we know there might be something wrong and we go to check on them at home.”
According to Le Yi, the committee opened the dining room at the suggestion of elderly residents who had trouble cooking for themselves at home. At the request of rural migrants new to the community, the committee also allowed the migrants’ children to enrol in the neighbourhood kindergarten.
Other services provided in Xujiachao include health education classes for older people and ‘convenience services’ (便民服务) such as bicycle repair. The committee has also created a workshop space where half a dozen semi-retired residents can take in factory piece-work—on the day we visited, threading beads for cheap jewellery—from which they can earn around CNY 20 per day.
A similar income generation project has been established by the committee in the temporary neighbourhood of Yizhan, where landless peasant families are nearing the end of a two-year wait for accommodation in a new development. Here, women sit clipping loose threads from machine knitted socks, earning around CNY 15 per day.
The Yizhan committee also organises excursions and training events to help familiarise residents with the urban environment that is mushrooming out of their former farmland. Photographs on the wall of a simple and deathly cold meeting room capture the highlights of these events: beaming faces clustered around an ATM machine; a row of graduates from a putonghua language training course.
Twenty families in the neighbourhood bought computers after an ITC training course laid on by the committee, according to one resident. “Our quality has improved a lot (我们素质提高了) since the neighbourhood committee came,” she says. “Rural people are of low quality.” Song Qinghua hastily interrupts this self-stigmatising caricature, which so neatly encapsulates urban Chinese prejudices. “It’s city aptitudes (城市能力) that you need,” she says. “Rural people don’t have city aptitudes, but city people don’t have rural aptitudes either.”
In the nearby, middle-income neighbourhood of Tai’an (泰安), the neighbourhood committee has established a home hairdressing service for elderly and bedridden residents. We visit one middle-aged stroke victim who has benefited from this service and is now cared for by his ageing father, who repeatedly expresses his gratitude.
After a five minute discussion of coiffure, with the neighbourhood staff and visitors crowded around the invalid’s bed, Song Qinghua urges him to try daily exercises—moving kidney beans between bowls—to regain the mobility in his semi-paralysed left hand. The Disabled Persons Federation appears to be conspicuous by its absence in this community, but the invigoration of the neighbourhood committees at least opens a future prospect of better referral and integration of social services.
Song Qinghua in action
Song Qinghua, aged 52, is an electrical engineer by training who in 1997 joined one of China’s NGO pioneers, Global Village of Beijing, to work on a ‘green communities’ project that encouraged the capital’s citizens to join waste recycling and ‘green consumption’ schemes.
Five years later Song left to found her own organisation, Community Action, which has a more generic interest in urban governance. In Chinese, the organisation goes by the name of Shining Stone (灿雨石), a homonym for the characters meaning ‘participatory’ (参与式). The wordplay arises from China’s tough NGO registration rules which left Song no choice but to register her organisation as a consulting company—and business registration authorities do not like ‘social’ titles.
Participation has become a mantra for NGOs working in rural poverty relief and development programmes in China, but Song’s group, which now has seven full time staff, is unusual in taking this discourse into urban affairs.
Many Chinese officials, she says, “have their own idea of citizen participation: ‘We decide, you participate.’” But sustainable community development, she argues, “has to start from the bottom.”
With grant support from the Ford Foundation she began in 2002 to spread this message through training programmes for Street Affairs Office staff in Wuhan and Beijing. Early discussions were “a bit too theoretical,” she recalls, “because at the time we hadn’t collected many real stories to illustrate the points, they weren’t grounded in much experience.”
A California-based non-profit organisation, the Wild Flowers Institute, which describes itself as “focusing on leadership development and community building in the United States and abroad,” then invited Song to lead a ‘Socially Sustainable Community Leadership’ training workshop in Beijing for district government officers from ten cities across China. Here Song met officials from Ningbo’s Haishu District who invited her to work with their neighbourhoods. In 2003, Haishu had already shown its progressive cast of mind by holding district-wide elections to neighbourhood committees.
The work in Ningbo has given Song plenty of “real stories” to strengthen her case for more open and responsive local government. For example, she says, “The other day the staff in one neighbourhood were discussing how, when they have to announce a new decision or policy, if they just put up posters (通知) to communicate this, people always criticise and complain. But if they hold a meeting to explain and discuss changes with the community, people usually see the point and are supportive, and there is less conflict.”
Song reads this as evidence of attitudinal change that can create a new relationship of trust between local government and residents. “Some people at the very top understand the need for this,” she claims, but local government is more generally populated by bureaucrats operating on remote control.
To open their eyes to other ways of working Song will, later this year, be taking local government officials on a study tour of urban neighbourhoods in the United States. “This will not be a pleasure trip,” Song states firmly. “They will work hard.”
The trip will be organised by the Wild Flowers Institute, which last year organised a two month training tour in the US for Song herself, and is providing funding and consultancy support for her work in Ningbo. She has also participated in exchange programmes with British community development organisations, organised by UK-based Global Links Initiative (www.glinet.org).
New model staff
Until recently, Chinese neighbourhood committees were run mainly by middle-aged or older residents, very often women, whose duties as birth control and public security monitors often set them up to be seen as the local ‘busybodies.’
From June 2003, Ningbo introduced an exam system for people entering work as neighbourhood committee staff, who are now described as ‘social workers’ (shegong, 社工). The title does not imply the kind of professional training or status that Western social workers have; but the committees are increasingly involved in marriage counselling, dispute mediation and youth work, and there is a trend towards staff professionalisation.
However, Yang Aiping says that although young graduates often perform better in written tests the Wangchung Street Affairs Office still prefers 30-40 year olds who have some experience of working with people.
Li Fei (李菲), who leads the Dongqiao (洞桥) Neighbourhood Committee staff team, is a typical example. She used to work in the Post Office in the community, but left because she was under-employed and bored. She says she finds the ‘social work’ rewarding because the routine is varied, she has plenty of chance to meet different people.
Le Yi from Xujiachao, previously worked for ten years in a hotel. When she moved to the committee, she says, “At first I just looked on it as a steady job, but it has proved to be quite different, very busy with a lot pressure.” Compared to the hotel, where deference to the customer was the golden rule, “In the community,relationships are more like family relationships, and I often feel very moved, especially working with the old people.”
Both women have attended Community Action trainings and seem to approach their work with a high level of motivation. “We can’t just keep to the old ways, we have to innovate in order to perform better,” says Le.
Informal leaders
Li Fei’s Dongqiao neighbourhood falls under Haishu District’s Duantang (段塘) Street Affairs Office, which has not yet formally collaborated with Community Action and the Wild Flowers Institute, but hopes soon to do so.
Donqiao has a total population of 5,546, of whom 2,200 are migrants, the majority from Anhui Province, without permanent urban registration. Many of them live in a row of old, ramshackle buildings known as ‘Anhui Street,’ where public services are poor or non-existent. At one end of the street, in a shack by the less than pure Nantang river (南塘河), one family sells boiled drinking water for two jiao (USD 1.6 cents) a litre and offers hot showers for CNY 5 (USD 58 cents).
In managing a community of this kind, says Li Fei “We have begun to realise that it is important to identify informal leaders. We help them to improve their public standing and trust (weixin, 威信), and also to build relations with the old [urban-registered] residents.”
One such natural leader is Mr. Zhao Zhibing (绍志兵), 38, who makes a living as a barber, charging CNY 3 per haircut in a shack across the river from the water seller. He came to Ningbo 14 years ago from an outlying rural area of Anhui’s capital, Hefei, and over the years nearly all his relatives have joined him. A cheerful man in an old flannel suit, he tells us that he donated his abandoned house in the village for collective use as an old persons’ meeting place.
His philanthropy is also evident in Ningbo’s Anhui Street. Outside his tottering house, the roof of which is caving in, he has placed two ancient pool tables for youngsters to use free of charge. He also helped to establish two ‘activity centres’ in the street. Both are unadorned rooms, one used by older people to play mah jong, and the other, at the time of our visit, occupied by a broken TV set and a group of night-shift workers from an adjacent dye factory, whiling away the afternoon playing cards.
“This helps to reduce our workload,” says Li Fei. “We should let migrants manage their own affairs.”
But one cannot help feeling that it can’t be as simple as that, given the disparity between this scrappy, squatter-like settlement and the gleaming developments across much of the city.
As we leave, moreover, a migrant woman from a different neighbourhood comes over to harangue the committee staff. Her daughter-in-law, she complains, has not yet received the annual CNY 100 (USD 12.5) incentive payment due to her for complying with birth control regulations.
The neighbourhood committed staff point out that the woman is not registered with them, she must go to the birth control authorities in her place of registration.
“She’ll just have to have another baby then, won’t she!” shouts the truculent plaintiff.
Community Action, if it starts to work here, will have quite a job achieving the seamless incorporation of migrants that the authorities need in order to preserve a ‘harmonious society.’
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Quick guide to urban administration in China
Chinese cities are administratively divided into Districts (qu, 区) that are in turn divided into several sub-districts overseen by Street Affairs Offices (jiedao banshichu, 街道办事处) staffed by salaried government workers. Each Street Affairs Office is responsible for administering a number of neighbourhood committees (jumin weiyuanhui, 居民委员会) in communities (shequ, 社区) of around 2,000 households. The neighbourhood committee has six or seven office holders who, in the past, were generally appointed by the Street Affairs Office—but, over the last few years, neighbourhood committee officials have been elected on a trial basis in some pilot areas. Where most neighbourhood committees previously comprised only the office holders, in more prosperous areas they now employ full-time staff—6 or 7 per neighbourhood in Ningbo’s case.
These administrative tiers correspond very roughly to the county town, township, and village level administrative structure of rural China.
Various service delivery models have emerged in the drive for ‘community construction’ of the last few years. In some coastal cities, Street Affairs Offices have created large, centralised community centres, somewhat eclipsing the neighbourhood committees.
Ningbo’s total population of roughly 6 million (not counting those without official urban hukou), is spread across the city proper, two counties and three county-level cities. The main urban area is divided into six districts, which are subdivided into 6 Street Affairs Offices. Below these are 63 neighbourhood committees.