Adaptation and enduring authoritarianism

An emerging literature contends that the CCP has proved remarkably resilient, not least because of its ability to adapt, experiment and innovate whilst retaining control. Nathan (Reference Nathan2003: 14–15) explains the Party's continued rule through input institutions such as competitive village elections and channels for directing citizens’ grievances. Reforms aimed at increasing public participation through public hearings, or measures to enhance state accountability, such as the 1989 Administrative Litigation Act, are but some of the mechanisms the Party uses to demonstrate responsiveness and boost legitimacy (He and Thogersen, 2010). Heilmann and Perry (Reference Heilmann, Perry, Heilmann and Perry2011) similarly argue that the continuing rule of the CCP, in contrast to the Soviet Union's rapid collapse, owes much to the Party's willingness to experiment and its creative adaptive capacities, which trace their heritage to Maoist guerrilla tactics during revolutionary struggle. Wang (Reference Wang2009: 370), too, contends that ‘deep-seated one-size-does-not-fit-all pragmatism’ underpins the CCP's resilience.

Shambaugh (Reference Shambaugh2008) relates the Party's resilience to internal changes in the Party and other social, economic, and institutional reforms which have bolstered its capacity to rule. He argues that adaptive reforms engender a constant cycle of reform and readjustment but holds back from concluding that this yields only positive outcomes. In his words, ‘Just as atrophy is not an exorable process leading to ultimate collapse, neither does adaptation lead to the happy land of political stability and sustainability’ (Shambaugh, Reference Shambaugh2008: 177). Adopting a softer approach to social unrest is part of this repertoire of adaptive governance. By engaging protestors in dialogue, mediating conflicts (Su and He, Reference Su and He2010) and channelling workers’ grievances through legal mechanisms based on individual rights (Friedman and Lee, 2010), the CCP has subtly managed to reduce the risk of instability arising from social grievances. As writers such as O'Brien (Reference O'Brien2009), Perry (Reference Perry2009) and Florini et al. (Reference Florini, Lai and Tan2012) contend, China is far from being on the brink of collapse. In Perry's words (Reference Perry2009: 20), ‘So long as the central state responds sympathetically yet shrewdly to the grievances expressed in widespread protest, it emerges strengthened rather than weakened’. Thus, the resilience and adaptation literature suggests that the CCP can maintain power as long as it keeps adapting dynamically to dilute, deflect and contain discontent. The prospects of regime change lie in an unimaginable distant future.

Whilst adaptation may at times thwart the development of alternative power bases and secure sufficient stability to maintain a modified form of rule, it can also backfire, causing more contestation, widening societal fissures and increasing alienation. Such backfiring is not just because of ‘new expectations and problems’ created by reform processes that then trigger readjustment, as Shambaugh (Reference Shambaugh2008: 177) hints at, but rather because the adaptive processes confront underlying structural processes, deep-seated inequalities and institutional pathologies. The process of creative adaptation may resolve immediate socio-economic problems that threaten to disrupt social order but can also aggravate or generate new contradictions that limit the success of adaptation. This may be usefully explored through the lens of community governance, a field that has experienced considerable institutional adaptation and innovation over the last twenty years, yet has rarely been discussed within the framework of authoritarian resilience and adaptation.

Background on Community Governance Reforms

As with village elections in rural areas, community governance reforms were partly a response to the perceived need to maintain social stability in urban areas (Read, Reference Read2000: 812). In the pre-reform period the primary institution for social cohesion, order and welfare was the urban ‘danwei’ or work-unit. It was here that most state enterprise employees lived their lives, worked and received welfare benefits. Those not in a work-unit fell under the umbrella of the residents’ committees (jumin weiyuanhui)Footnote ⁵ . These committees were quasi-governmental, social institutions that undertook state functions such as distributing welfare, family planning, and resolving disputes. The committees were composed of volunteers, often retired and older women, who served as intermediary conduits between residents and the street committee (jiedao weiyuanhui), the lowest level of government (Heberer, Reference Heberer2009: 492; Heberer and Goebel, Reference Heberer and Goebel2011: 78–80; Bray, Reference Bray2005: 185).

Increasing rural-urban migration, privatisation of property and the collapse of the work-unit were changing the social fabric of cities, creating new spatial and socio-economic inequalities and splintering social cohesion. Local governance at street committee level and below struggled to keep pace with the changing demands of a rapidly shifting local populace (Li, Reference Li2008: 135). As Read (Reference Read2000: 811) notes, officials recognised that residents’ committees had become ‘sclerotic, overly authoritarian, underfunded and isolated from their communities’, and no longer fit for purpose. The working style, institutional structures, and rationale of local governance needed to change to cope with new demands and maintain social order.

It was against this backdrop that the CCP introduced top-down reforms to create new institutions of local urban governance. To this end it resuscitated the concept of ‘community’, drawing on the exemplary work of Fei Xiaotong, who translated ‘community’ (shequ) as a society in a spatially defined area (Xu, Reference Xu2008: 634; Bray, Reference Bray2005: 181–183; Li, Reference Li2008). This concept of a community was institutionalised in the 1989 Organic Law on Urban Residents’ Committee Organisation, which delimited the boundaries of a community as an area broader than the old residents’ committee but smaller than the street committee, comprising between 100 and 700 households according to Article 6 (Heberer, Reference Heberer2009: 493; Bray, Reference Bray2005: 334). Below the community are the residents’ committees which in turn provide the focal point for smaller residential sub-neighbourhoods (xiaoqu). The 1989 Law forms the legal basis for community governance policies and principles encapsulated in the official discourse of ‘self-management, self-education and self-service’, the ‘three selfs’. The ‘community’ (shequ) is thus a legally constituted, territorially limited and administratively defined concept that is distinct from sociological conceptions of community as self-formed groups such as community of eco-warriors.

As in many reform processes, the CCP granted selected localities permission to experiment between 1991 and 1995 and devise different models of community governance (Yan and Gao, Reference Yan and Gao2005: 225; and Heilmann, Reference Heilmann, Kipnis, Tomba and Unger2009). Experiments began first in Shanghai, Shenyang and Wuhan, the Shenyang model being more ‘bottom-up’ than the ‘administrative penetration’ model of Shanghai (Lu and Li, Reference Lu and Li2008: 182; Bray, Reference Bray2005: 183–190; Xu, Reference Xu2008: 637). Following further experimentation, the idea of community and community construction was included in 2001 in the 10^th Economic and Social Plan. With the streamlining of state enterprises from the mid-1990s, the role of the community in governing laid-off workers and migrants grew in importance (Bray, Reference Bray2005: 536). It was during the period of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao (2002–2012), when issues of social development and ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui) were emphasised, that the idea of community-building was pushed forward (Xu, Reference Xu2008: 637).

The ‘three selfs’ principles of community governance heralded both a re-working of state-society relations at the local level, and new institutions and practices. In the new system the relationship between residents’ committees and street committees was to become one of ‘guidance’ rather than leadership, signalling greater autonomy for communities. The use of the concept of ‘self’ signifies an attempt to reduce the dependence of individual citizens on the state, and to shift residents’ allegiance and identity from the work-unit to the community. It is part of a broader strategy of state and welfare reform, whereby certain welfare functions are offloaded onto the market and society, and communities become part of new governance techniques as the front-line of welfare provision (Heberer, Reference Heberer2009). Ultimately it signals a more indirect role for the state whereby it regulates rather than commands, paralleling the direction of market reforms.

These principles inform the new institutional adaptations such as the notion of the citizen as an independent actor in public affairs, the spatial re-ordering of governance through new community centres, community elections and the cultivation of a new type of personnel: namely, the professional social worker. Adaptation has also expanded governing institutions at community level such as property management committees, property owners’ committees, and sub-contracted non-governmental community organisations. The new-fangled community centres serve as the central locus of citizen interaction with the state, with counters corresponding to governmental functions such as welfare assistance and employment.

Apart from creating new structures, the adaptation of local governance has also entailed changes in staffing. While previous residents’ committees were run by volunteers and retired cadres, who often held their positions indefinitely, in the new system local governments have increasingly appointed graduate-trained social workers to work in street and residents’ committees, increasing their salaries and compensation as an incentive (Lu and Li, Reference Lu and Li2008: 183; Pan, Reference Pan2007; Yu, Reference Yu2008a)Footnote ⁶ . Elections to the residents’ committee on a three-yearly basis have also been introduced to draw popular leaders into governance positions, thereby strengthening potentially the legitimacy of the local Party/state, as done with village elections. Experiments with residents’ committee elections started in 1999 in Shanghai (Gui et al., Reference Gui, Cheng and Ma2006) and, by 2006, 40 per cent of committees held direct elections (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Cooper and Sun2009). There are thus at least four types of community governance personnel at the neighbourhood level: professional social workers, who serve as community construction workers (Yan and Gao, Reference Yan and Gao2005: 225), elected representatives, volunteers, and cadres, the first two being recent innovations.

This shift from a top-down approach towards a more citizen-driven, seemingly more inclusive, way of governing communities poses potential challenges on behavioural and political fronts. In the case of residents, community governance requires them to be more active in community affairs. It assumes the availability of time, capacity to self-organise, willingness to participate, and identification with the community. As for cadres, Party leaders and members, this implies shifting from commanding people to guiding people, from mobilising residents through campaigns to cultivating their self-help capacities, from determining people's needs to being responsive, and ‘co-governing’ with market and social organisations (Li, Reference Li2008: 139). Yet granting greater autonomy to communities carries political risks of oppositional organising and as Florini et al. (Reference Florini, Lai and Tan2012: 178) note, of ‘divergent normative directions’. To mitigate this risk the Party from the late 1990s has strengthened Party-building in grassroots communities, setting a limit on citizen autonomy (Li, Reference Li2008: 135; Yu, Reference Yu2008b: 4) and ensuring co-governance remains under Party leadership. As shown in the next section, adaptation does not always produce outcomes that enhance social cohesion and stability, fostering instead increased alienation and distrust.

Community Governance In Practice

This section outlines the contours of institutional adaptation in community governance in two Shanghai neighbourhoods, whilst the subsequent section examines the unintended consequences of residents’ committee reforms as regards self-governance goals.

Shanghai, with a population of 23 million, 19 districts, 99 street committees and 3,661 residents’ committees, has been a pioneer in the administrative restructuring of local governance. In particular it devised the ‘two levels of government, three levels of management, and four levels of networks’ framework of local governance, whereby the street committee served as the lowest level of government administration and the residents’ committee as the lowest level of implementation (Li, Reference Li2008; Yu, Reference Yu2008a, Reference Yu2008b; Gui et al., Reference Gui, Cheng and Ma2006). As Gui et al. (Reference Gui, Cheng and Ma2006:12–13) noted, these arrangements strengthened the administrative role of residents’ committees, while Articles 1 and 2 of the 1989 Organic Law underlined their self-governing nature, a contradiction that was to be surmounted through the development of residents’ committee elections.

The two small residential areas (xiaoqu) investigated are referred to as Neighbourhood 1 (NH1) and Neighbourhood 2 (NH2). NH1 is an old, established area in central Shanghai and one of 19 residents’ committees under the street committee, covering around 5,000 residents. NH2 is a newly constructed peripheral area with a similar population size in one of three towns in the fast-growing area on the east side of Huangpu river. The architecture of NH1 reflects its multiple layers of history: ramshackled wooden buildings in narrow, winding allies (lilong); spacious French villas that were forcefully divided up for multiple occupancy during the Cultural Revolution; and six-storeyed workers’ blocks constructed after Liberation (Pan, Reference Pan2007). It was an area undergoing massive demographic change as young family members moved out, developers gentrified old houses, and migrants poured in, renting accommodation at rates that far outweighed the actual costs to owners. With its central location and convenience for shopping, welfare facilities and transport, residents were in general satisfied with their environment, their main concerns being dog excrement, the hanging of laundry, and migrants.

The main focus of the residents’ committee over the last decade had been the elderly and migrants, the latter constituting half of the population. In the former case this required organising services to cover the gap left by young people, who had moved away; in the latter it was a matter of monitoring and control. Such was the influx of migrants that the Public Security department assigned three additional cadres to work in the committee. The community government also allocated an established position to tackle youth unemployment. Altogether the residents’ committee had eight full-time, salaried staff members, including the Director and Party Secretary, who was the highest authority, six social workers, and four part-time, voluntary, ‘non-desk’ committee members.

Established in 2006, NH2 is a newly constructed, territorial and administrative community built on a grid system mainly to accommodate evicted villagers resettled after the demolition of their village for an international event. The neighbourhood falls under a community government (shequ) that in turn answers to the nearby town authorities. Around two-thirds of the town's population were non-Shanghai residents and a similar number had been evicted from elsewhereFootnote ⁷ . The urban landscape was dominated by newly built high-rise buildings and lacked the historical layers of architecture of NH1. Compared to residents in the rickety wooden buildings in NH1, NH2 residents enjoyed more spacious accommodation with an indoor, private bathroom, toilet and kitchen, a marked improvement on their previous housing. However, public transport was inadequate, and shopping for food and household necessities was inconvenient. Residents were nostalgic for the neighbourliness and intimacy that the spatial configuration of their former village housing allowed and that the anonymous high-rises seemed to denyFootnote ⁸ . As in NH1, their main concerns centred on the management of dog excrement, laundry and migrants.

Both residential areas (xiaoqu) have undergone processes of institutional adaptation and innovation. Taking first NH1, the district in which it was located had been merged with another district in 2011, leading to changes in institutional structure. Before the merger, NH1 had a tripartite structure of governance, made up of the Party branch, resident's committee and social work office. Under this arrangement, the Party was responsible for Party matters only; the residents’ committee represented the residents; and the social work office conducted daily administrative work related to government functions. The community government assigned social workers to work in the social work office, most of whom did not live in the community. Residents’ committee members were elected by residents, non-salaried (apart from the committee head) and required to live in the community (Liu, Reference Liu and Zang2011:74; Pan, Reference Pan2007). The responsibilities of residents’ committees included supervising the social workers and reflecting the residents’ views to the committee. There was considerable overlap between the members of the Party committee, the social work office and the residents’ committee.

After 2011, a bipartite structure of Party Committee and residents’ committee was introduced to match governance arrangements in the larger district. The key difference was that the social work office and the residents’ committee were merged. As only one of the former social workers lived in the community, the remaining social workers were hired back in as residents’ committee members, their salaries covered by the community government. Furthermore, the Party secretary, who had hitherto lived in the neighbourhood, now came from outsideFootnote ⁹ . The main community governance institutions in NH1 were thus the Party committee and members, residents’ committee and volunteer network, the housing management office and the district community centre that was located near the district government offices. Though the community centre created spaces for residents to organise and participate in social and cultural activities, the administrative re-organisation, as will be discussed below, weakened the connective tissue between the neighbourhood and residents.

In NH2, the main political institutions were the Party committee and resident members, the residents’ committee and volunteer network, and the property management committee. The residents’ committee sought to operate in the new mould of community governance, promoting self-management, self-supervision, self-service and self-education. Committee members were elected by residents every three years and their salaries covered by the town government. NH2 also had a new community centre with a one-stop system of servicing residents. This centre organised social activities for residents such as local opera, talks, dancing; provided space for residents to organise cultural and recreational activities; sub-contracted niche services to non-governmental community organisations; and provided rooms for Party members and activities. The residents’ committee had created spaces for residents to participate, but these were mainly for older people rather than the young, middle-aged or parents with young children, which some interviewees would have wished for.

This new community had a highly organised capillary system of volunteers, mainly retired, older women, and Party cells that served as the neighbourhood's ‘eyes and ears’. Given the potential for social unrest amongst a forcefully resettled community that had experienced the violence of destructive development, Party-building took on particular significance in NH2. Altogether there were 96 residents’ representatives, 48 block leaders and 391 volunteers, as well as 250 Party members. The residents’ committee and Party committee assigned tasks to the volunteer and Party member networks, and the elected block leaders. Block leaders acted as a bridge between the residents and the residents’ committee, informing them about recent in-migration and new pregnancies. In NH2 there were 100 regular volunteers, tasked with night patrols, removing rubbish, liaising between residents and the committee, assisting with elections, or nominating ‘civilised blocks’ (wenming lou), which met certain criteria such as keeping public areas free of bikes and other obstacles and keeping public corridors clean.

These adaptations in the institutional architecture required changes for both citizens and Party/state cadres. In NH2, for example, the town governor expected Party members and community cells to function as ‘Party citizens’, serving as models of self-governing. The residents’ committee also saw its role as shifting residents from a relationship of state dependence to one of resourcefulness, initiative and community engagement. In this new scenario the state was to guide and respond to people's needs, resonant of the expectations for cadres during the Yenan period and Maoist decades to be ‘exemplars, pastors and technical experts’ (Bray, Reference Bray2005: 56–65). As demonstrated in the next section, community governance reforms had unintended consequences as they confronted the fault-lines of adaptive governance.

Fault-lines of adaptive community governance

Insights from the two Shanghai neighbourhoods reveal the institutional, socio-economic and political fault-lines that can rupture state attempts to re-fashion community governance and how the failure to reform in one area can affect another. Adaptation does not occur in a vacuum. Deep-seated processes of marketisation, urbanisation and structural inequalities mean that altering state-society relations at community level cannot be easily engineered. Enduring inequalities relating to the residence permit system (hukou) that divides rural and urban residents and aspects of reforms such as the professionalization of residents’ committee work can thwart intended goals. The political fault-line of an authoritarian state seeking to entrench its control over society runs against the grain of community self-governance. This section examines how community governance reforms at residents’ committee level have unintended consequences, such as reinforcing social exclusion, alienation and reluctant participation, rendering it difficult to achieve greater social cohesion and residents’ engagement in public affairs.

In analysing the field-data the following framework was used to identify whether shifts towards self-governance were occurring or not. The purpose of the community governance reforms was ostensibly to promote self-governance and greater state responsiveness to community needs. If the street and residents’ committees did adopt a more guiding rather than commanding role, then it could be expected that residents’ committees would attend more to residents’ needs rather than instructions from the street committee or a higher level. The residents’ committee would make available space and resources for citizens to organise themselves. If citizens were becoming less dependent on the state, then they would take the initiative to organise themselves and become more active in community affairs, whether this be setting up property owners’ committees, social and cultural activities, or participating in community elections by standing as candidates, nominating candidates, and voting. The resident's committee and Party networks would give residents leeway to organise themselves rather than mobilising participation from above, fostering greater social cohesion and inclusiveness. Alternatively, if the reforms were not achieving their self-governance goals, then the residents’ committee would continue to prioritise targets from above. It would mobilise residents to volunteer and participate, whilst the Party would strengthen its presence in the community. Residents would not take the initiative to engage in community affairs or actively participate in elections.