Community work stations: an incremental fix of the community construction project in China.

In the early 1950s, China developed an urban governance system, which always had a dual function: providing community services and exercising sociopolitical control, to ensure stability of an organized society. The economic reforms of the late 1970s, however, made the system obsolete. In 2000, China adopted a community-building policy to renew its urban governance system, in which residents' committees (RCs), self-governing mass organizations, have been assigned a major role. However, as the base of the system, RCs have been overburdened by numerous administrative responsibilities. Over-administration consequentially challenges their self-governing mandate. To resolve these double predicament, community work stations (CWSs) are being tried. This paper examines four CWS models and discusses the impacts of CWS on RCs and on the urban governance system. The paper argues that as an incremental policy response in a social engineering process, the role of CWSs in China's urban governance system is yet to be decided, particularly when they may pose challenges to the original policy intent of the community construction policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]