Restructuring urban governance

Abstract

In urban China, neighbourhoods are administratively demarcated and under the management of Neighbourhood Residents’ Committees, officially recognized as self‐governing grassroots organizations. The increase in their responsibilities and authority, introduced in the late 1990s to help alleviate the burden of welfare service provision on local government, is the focus of this neighbourhood reform under the ‘Community Construction’ policy and program. Our intent in this paper is to understand the emerging forms of self‐governance in urban neighbourhoods. A background section briefly maps the pressures on existing governing institutions, the origins of the policy and its long‐term objectives. Formulated by the central government and relayed down the administrative hierarchy to urban Neighbourhood Committees throughout the country, is by its very nature top‐down. In seeking an endogenous rather than Western perspective informed by liberal democracy concepts, the core of our paper presents the stories of three Nanjing Neighbourhood Committee Directors who were asked to talk about what neighbourhood self‐governance means to them. Their utilitarian perspectives, shaped by the realities of their daily work, remind us of the need to focus on the impacts on community life brought about through local action within the Chinese party–state structure.