Social Construction and Social Development in Contemporary China by Lu Xueyi;

Author:Lu, Xueyi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Community building

By community, we mean here the form of governance and administrative organization at the grassroots level. After the dissolution, the people’s communes were transformed into towns (镇) and townships(乡), the brigades into administrative villages (行政村), and the production teams into villagers’ groups (村民小 组). The three-level organizational structure of governance remained unchanged. After the 1980s, villager self-government, democratic election, decision-making, management, and supervision were introduced in rural areas. Some regions made impressive accomplishments. Although situations varied from region to region, and the grassroots organizations in some regions were almost paralyzed, 900 million farmers became organized. Now the governance problems of grassroots organizations lie mainly in urban areas. After the mid-1980s, the pace of urbanization accelerated. In 1978, there were only 220 cities and 119.94 million urban residents in China. By 2006, the number of cities had reached 662 and the urban population increased to 577.06 million. Among them, 365.48 million were registered as urban residents and 211.58 million resided permanently in cities without being registered there. During the 28 years, urban population has increased by 457.12 million, and the number of urban registered residents by 245.54 million. Hundreds of millions of people have moved to cities and towns. Most of them are unorganized. Only the public security system has statistics.

At present, in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and other large and medium-sized cities, under the municipal governments, there are districts and counties(区县). Under districts and counties, there are subdistricts (街道), townships, and towns (乡镇). The next level is residential committees (居民委员会), also known as community committees (in Shanghai, subdistricts are called communities (社区) and residential committees are called small communities (小区). In Beijing, residential committees had no cadres who were released from production or regular work before 1990. In recent years, the subdistrict offices have sent full-time cadres to residential committees and set up party organizations with thousands of residents under their jurisdiction. Urban residents are gradually becoming organized. For various reasons, in many large and medium-sized cities, there are villages in the cities. Thus, under the subdistrict offices, there are not only residential committees, but also village committees (村民委员会). In cities like Shenzhen and Dongguan, there are already 10 million residents, but grassroots organizations have not yet been established. There is a town in Shenzhen called Buji (changed to subdistrict office in 2004) with 1.1 million residents. It is actually the size of a big city, but still has the administrative structure of a subdistrict with an authorized staff of only 80 cadres. Under the subdistrict office, there are both residential committees (communities) and village committees. Under such conditions, it is very difficult to carry out social construction and to have effective social management.

In the 1980s, there were over 2,000 counties (and county-level cities) with only a few thousand inhabitants in areas where the county governments were located. Some areas had a larger number of inhabitants ranging from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Most of them were run like rural areas under the jurisdiction of the county seats (城关镇). With

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.