The New York Times

Tuesday, April 11, 2000

China's Neighborly Snoops Reinvent Themselves

By ERIK ECKHOLM

SHENYANG, China -- For urban Chinese who are middle-aged and beyond, the old "neighborhood committees" that watched over every household are among the more obnoxious memories of the early decades of Communist rule.

Staffed, as lore has it, by one's nosiest neighbors, the committees were empowered to scrutinize every visitor, report every antisocial activity and even monitor pregnancies. On the more positive side, they also sorted out neighborly disputes, watched out for burglars or fallen power lines, and sometimes even ran convenient food shops.

Over the last 20 years, with the decline of Marxist fervor and the emergence of a more diverse society, the committees waned but they never quite disappeared, continuing to organize retirees into "neighborhood watch" patrols and still keeping careful track of all local residents.

Now, with experiments in Shenyang and 19 other cities, the Government is trying to reinvent this venerable institution.

Cities are replacing the legendary "seven grannies with eight teeth between them" with more professional, somewhat younger staffs that can link up citizens up with vital social services such as finding help for an isolated elderly person.

The changes are driven, officials say, by the rapid decay of the old "work unit" system, in which state industries and other employers guaranteed a lifetime income, housing, medical care and other benefits to their workers. As such enterprises shut down and their social services evaporate, the plan is for the newly invigorated neighborhood committees to take up part of the slack

A more basic if perhaps quixotic hope these days is to put the Communist Party back in touch with common folks. And while no one says it out loud, the authorities also want to save these street-level organizations to help keep tabs on an increasingly mobile and independent population -- reporting on, for example, the presence of illegal rural migrants or stubborn followers of a banned sect.

Shenyang, a former bastion of socialist industry better known lately for its eerie vistas of idle smokestacks and protests by unpaid workers, aims to be on the cutting edge of this new neighborhood movement. In this reeling northeastern city, officials are even boasting of a new "grass-roots democracy," using local elections to select "community administrative committee" leaders on the theory that this will energize citizens and improve services like job training, garbage collection and care for the elderly.

"One of our goals is to return power to the people," said Liang Wanfu, deputy chief of the Shenyang Civil Affairs Bureau, in an interview. "In the past the role of the Communist Party was to take care of the people, but now it has to let the people take care of themselves."

Lofty words aside, the new elections are also firmly intended to promote party loyalists, it was apparent on a recent visit to one of the city's model new community groups.

Though the city's energetic mayor, Mu Xuexin, has described the neighborhood policy as an unavoidable response to the city's economic woes, the changes have hardly begun in the city's most stricken district, Tiexin, once the epicenter of heavy industry and now littered with rusting state factories. A sampling of residents there found many who were skeptical, to the extent they were at all aware of the city's plans.

"Tiexin has become like a holiday village, nobody works here any more," said Mr. Yao, who was laid off from a military uniform factory. Actually, many are working but for themselves, crowded along Tiexin's sidewalks hawking snacks, cigarettes or underwear.

Mr. Yao contended that a job-training center promoted by his local committee was a sham. "What jobs are they going to train us for, anyway?"

In a more prosperous neighborhood nearby, private businessmen living in one of the city's finer apartment buildings said they knew of the new system and had even attended meetings. Some said that such committees were considerably less relevant to their lives than, say, apartment management companies or private businesses.

A more generous assessment, and a glimpse at how officials hope the new structure can help citizens, came from Wang Qiang, 34, the owner of an electronics factory. He said he had been invited to join an advisory group of the newly elected committee near his factory site and had already benefited.

When he told the group that his biggest problem was trying to get a loan, he said, they put him in touch with a city technology board, which arranged for a low-interest loan.

"I was able to expand my company and hire more workers," he said. "This was very useful."

Shenyang, in line with the strategy across urban China, has redrawn its old neighborhood maps, creating community districts that cover larger areas than before, now averaging 1,264 households each. Each "community" has an elected administrative committee of six or so people whose jobs are to promote hygiene, cultural events, family planning, crime control and economic development and to deal with citizen complaints. They are paid modestly and have no independent powers or budget, but rather are meant to act as liaisons with the government.

Shenyang officials say that with their new neighborhood elections they are creating the urban equivalent of the village elections now held in most of rural China.

"It used to be that the grass-roots organizations were actually the 'feet' of the government, just following where they were told to go," said Mr. Liang, the city official. "Now these local organizations have to becomes the heads, guiding change."

An afternoon with the staff of the Yonghuan community, an area in central Shenyang whose residents have mostly been spared the mass layoffs of Tiexin, reveals a more complex pattern of give and take.

Voting for the six committee leaders is carried out by an assembly of household representatives, often retirees, who are appointed by local party officials to represent their immediate neighbors -- typically, the 10 to 20 households sharing an apartment building entrance.

The candidates for the six paid jobs, who are not necessarily local residents, are screened and nominated by by officials, with Communist Party membership a major criterion along with youth (preferably under 50) and educational level, said Guo Lingbo, 51, the head of the Yonghuan Community Administrative Committee who was elected in this manner last summer.

Ms. Guo, a party member, retired at age 50 from her job heading the nursery for the city telephone department. Her new post pays only $42 a month, but this is in addition to her larger pension. Two of the other elected leaders are laid-off workers, she said, and two are retirees like herself.

With the local Communist Party secretary, Sun Xugui, at her side and often jumping in to clarify a point, Ms. Guo described the benefits of, as she put it, "democratic self-government" in her bailiwick of 1,800 households in 41 identical apartment blocks containing a mix of teachers and office and factory workers.

In one clear gain, her unit got city aid to establish a small clinic, saving trips to the hospital for routine medical problems. She also said the paid committee members had successfully sought help from local companies to find new jobs for residents. As she showed a visitor around, Ms. Guo admonished a citizen to put her garbage bag into the streetside can.

The people may be the guides in theory, but last summer, at the first big meeting of household representatives, the committee leaders preached about the one-child policy.

"Some people still have traditional attitudes, they might want a son even if they have a daughter, so that requires extra vigilance on our part," Ms. Guo recalled telling the group.

Three elderly household representatives, selected by Ms. Guo to tell a reporter what the new system had done for their blocks, cited more prosaic concerns.

When the water was temporarily shut off to an elderly widow's apartment, one said, the committee had organized people to carry buckets of water upstairs to her. Crime patrols had stopped thefts, another said.

And when some newcomers to the neighborhood threw wastewater out of their windows, the third said, "We strengthened propaganda on the need to maintain a clean environment."