Bringing the Party Back into the Community: Restructuring Grassroots Governance in Shenzhen

Grassroots community governance has long remained a crucial issue in studies of state–society relations in China.¹ After Xi Jinping 习近平 took power, China's idea of social governance changed significantly.² Diverging from the guidance of “community building” (shequ jianshe 社区建设) of the Hu–Wen administration, with its goal of “establishing a social governance model based on collaboration, participation and common interests,”³ the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began ramping up the Party committee's (PC hereafter) leading role in grassroots governance. Party building has become a new focus in community governance nationwide and the Party has employed a variety of regional experimental models at the grassroots.⁴ However, little is known empirically about the details of these local experiments.

This article investigates Shenzhen as a regional empirical model for the Party's reconfiguration of community governance. By bringing the Party back in and separating it from government, this article constructs a triadic analytical framework of Party–government–society.⁵ Using P district's experience of Party advancement in Shenzhen, this article identifies the Party's strategies for reconfiguring the power structure and the governance mode at the grassroots level.

To regain its leadership role, the local PC reformulated the relationship between the Party, government and society in two ways. First, the district and the street PCs reclassified the relationships among various actors along with the Party's organizational structure and regarded all community matters as Party-building affairs (dangwu 党务). They kicked government affairs (zhengwu 政务) back to the street level by separating government affairs from Party-building affairs, thus achieving the separation of Party and government (dang zheng fenkai 党政分开). Second, as the government retreated, the Party began to reshape relations between the Party and the masses (dang qun guanxi 党群关系) rather than reinvigorating civil society to fill the vacancy in grassroots governance left by the “politics-economy/society separation” (zheng jing/she fenli 政经/社分离). Specifically, the district and street PCs renewed their leadership within the community via three approaches: reconstructing the centre–periphery organization system, incorporating community elites in a top-down way, and exploiting the concept of “service delivery taking the lead” (fuwu yinling 服务引领) in a reciprocal exchange. We further find that through the separation of Party and government and the reshaping of Party–mass relations, the Party...