Revitalizing the State's Urban “Nerve Tips”

While observers of China have always paid attention to the “base-level” administrative institutions and mass organizations created by the Communist party-state, urban Residents' Committees (RCs; jumin weiyuanhui) have received relatively little study in recent years. Though the RCs remain pervasive in most areas of most cities and engage the energies of millions of activists and volunteers, this neglect is understandable. During the Mao era, Western writing on neighbourhood organizations emphasized their role in helping to police and administer the harsh political order that gripped the cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the authorities have yielded much greater space to a private sphere in which law-abiding individuals are relatively free from intrusion. Instruments of state penetration such as the RCs have seemed less worthy of analysis. They also lack the requisite autonomy to qualify as part of an emergent civil society, and moreover their limited progress in serving as a focus for democratic participation earns them much less international attention than their rural equivalents, the Villagers' Committees. They may even seem worthy of derision rather than study; merely mentioning the term juweihui often brings an amused smile to people's faces, as it connotes ageing, officious busy bodies poking into people's personal matters.