Urban community-based services in China: tensions in the transitions

Abstract

Instead of claiming responsibility in caring for its citizens from cradle to grave, China now emphasizes ‘small government and big society’ in its allocation of social services. In one southwest province of China, as a result of the urban Community Residents Committee (CRC) Organization Acts of 1989, the CRC has become the core of social services in this region and is on the front line of social service delivery. This paper reports the results of a field study on the CRC at a number of pilot demonstration sites in this province. Focus group discussions were conducted in order to identify characteristics and patterns of committee members’ experiences. Thematic patterns undergirding the future development of urban community-based social services in China are identified and discussed. Before the 1978 economic reform, urban neighborhood organizations were integral parts of the service delivery under the Communist planned economy and socialist welfare systems in China. The centralized social service provisions trickled down from the administrative hierarchy in the central government to the local communities, in that neighborhood organizations were the primary front line service providers (Xu and Jones, 2004). The economic reform since 1978 does not only lead to a fundamental transformation of the centralized planned economy, it is also bringing about inevitable changes in social welfare delivery. With the diminishing of job security resulted from the drastic changes in the state owned enterprises, such as privatization, reorganization, and downsizing, there was a collapse of the safety net that was traditionally built into the employment unit. Instead of claiming responsibility in caring for its citizens from cradle to grave, the Chinese government now embraces the concept of ‘small government and big society’ (Ministry of Civil Affairs, P. R. o. C, 2000). New forms of community-based social services have been tested, with the hope that effective models can be identified for bridging the widening gap between increasing demand of services and the decreasing provisions from the state. Instituted through the Urban Community Residents Committee Organization Acts in 1989, the Community Residents Committee (CRC) has become the core of this social experiment and is designated as the front line entity for carrying out such an experiment (Zhang, 2001). As well, high expectations for this movement from the government prompted the former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to say that local communities will be the foundation of a new social welfare system (Zhang, 2001). The experiments on testing the efficacy of community-based services were intensified by the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is the desire of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the entity charged with the responsibility of social welfare, to evaluate the experiments and to identify effective models for implementation at the national level (Ministry of Civil Affairs, P. R. o. C, 2001). Even though the concept of community-based services is not new to China, how it is going to evolve and shape the future of social service delivery in this transition economy and rapidly changing society is still yet to be seen. To carry out the mandate from the Central government, each province is expected to systematically implement pilot models in selected demonstration sites before considering a large scale implementation. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research, especially empirical field based studies for guiding the design and implementation. In response to the invitation of the Provincial Civil Affairs Department from one southwest province in China, the authors conducted a limited scale and informal evaluation by investigating the experiences and interpretations of CRC members in relation to their participation in the pilot project implementation. Since the CRC is the primary organization for implementing such an experiment, committee members’ interpretations of their experiences would arguably be one of the most important sources for shedding light on the efficacy of the model. This article reports the results of such a field study at a number of pilot demonstration sites in one southwest province. Focus group discussions were conducted for identifying characteristics and patterns of committee members’ experiences. The thematic patterns undergirding the future development of urban community-based social services in China are addressed. It is important to note that the ‘end-users’ of these communitybased services, the ordinary community residents, were not the main target of the investigation and only a few of them were briefly contacted during the community field visits after the focus group discussion. Interpretations of study results should be cognizant of this limitation.