In the recent five years, following the new frames established by the Chinese central government, street offices (jiedao) and residents’ committees (shequ) – the grassroots administrations of Chinese cities – have adopted a new concept to describe their apparently new way of working: shequ zhili. This concept is commonly translated by Chinese scholars as “community governance”. As clearly pointed out by Chinese academic literature, this concept is a direct borrowing from the concept of community governance as developed in Western countries – and specifically in different Anglophone countries.
In this literature, community governance is seen as a way to encourage residents to participate to the management of the community, as opposed to the old way of working of the community, called “shequ guanli”, which can be translated as “community management”. The latter, in the Chinese academic literature, as well as in the wording of the administration, is connotated as an approach that needs to be reformed, as its demands in terms of capacities and efforts for the local government have become too high. This is the reason why public participation is seen as a potential solution to support the management of community affairs.
This paper aims at interrogating the translation of the concept of community governance into “shequ zhili”, by looking into the academic literature, as well as into the written and spoken discourse of the Chinese government. It assumes that when any concept is appropriated in a specific context, it is hybridised to better fit the characteristics of the context itself. In so doing, the paper engages with the concept of “culture”, in order to extrapolate some insights to enhance our understandings of the idea of “Chinese characteristics”, an expression that often accompanies the official wording of the Chinese government when it describes its reforms and public policies.
