An Interview with Dr Chunrong Liu
By Bingshu Zhao and Dario Castiglione
Dr Chunrong Liu is an associate professor of political science at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs (SIRPA), Fudan University, and a research associate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS). He received PhD from the City University of Hong Kong, and conducted post-doctoral research at Georgetown University. Dr Liu’s research interests lie in the areas of political sociology and comparative politics. He has published widely on the dynamics of state-society relations in post-reform China, including several authored or co-authored books in Chinese such as Bring the Grassroots Back In (2019), Community Governance and Marginal Innovations in Chinese Politics (2018), and Chinese Society along the Huangpu River (2016).
In this interview, Dr Chunrong Liu talks about the social transitions and local governance innovations in China since the 1990s and how these have triggered his research interests in the dynamics of state-society relations and civic participation, and sheds light on the new developments and challenges brought by demographic changes, social media and pandemic. Sharing his insights on a relational and collective concept of citizenship, he suggests that at the grassroots level, citizens are encouraged to maintain certain aspects of individual autonomy and pursue moral roles in social relations, public obligations and collective responsibility, and calls for a new approach to theorising the community governance in China with both a comparative perspective and close attention to its local variations. (Note: the following text is slightly edited on the basis of the transcript. )
Bingshu Zhao: We would like to start asking about your intellectual background and formation. What did you study at the University, and how did you become interested in the research areas of civil society, participation, and grassroots governance?
Chunrong Liu: I was trained in the disciplines of political science and sociology when I studied politics at the University of Fudan in Shanghai in the late 1990s. We were, back then, interested in normative state theories in addition to some grand narrative of social sciences. We were also encouraged to study the plurality of state forms and different configurations of the state-society complex. Naturally, those topics came into my mind.
The late 1990s was also quite a time of enormous market transformations and rapid social transitions, which triggered a lot of local experiments and so-called governance innovation. You could feel the pulse of new institutions, new forms of social control, social engagements, and community organizing that occurred during that period time, not only from above but also from below. So, as a student of political science, we have a shared feeling that we face a pronounced gap of knowledge between theory and reality. I was participating in some projects on community participation, and I became so preoccupied with state-fostered participatory institutions. In Chinese politics, we sometimes call it the “nerve tip” of body politics. In this domain, we were also greatly exposed to those emerging self-organizing civic spaces that are, to some degree, autonomous from state control.
I carried on this research interest about the dynamics of stated-society relations in my PhD projects. After I returned to Fudan, as a faculty member, I continued to address participatory governance in several research projects. I felt there was a need to engage more with the local, global and comparative perspectives, and that’s why I found your Citizen Empowerment Project, as well as Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network, especially meaningful.
Bingshu Zhao: In your recent article “Preserving spontaneous order”, published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, you discussed community building in post-reform urban China. You emphasized the importance of the transformation from the danwei system, which relied on work-based units, to, by contrast, the neighbourhood-based communities. In other words, a shift of focus and power from the place of work to territorial governance. This seems quite a profound social and ideological transformation. Was its direction clear from the very beginning? Was it easy during the transformative process? Has it, in any sense, produced a new idea of citizenship in China?
Chunrong Liu: this is a very important question. Danwei, or Working unit, as you know, is a basic and fundamental socialist institution in place since the 1950s. It is the organizational form of plan economy featuring lifetime job tenure and participatory mechanisms. It makes a multi-functional realm combining politics and production. You could see, before the reform, most of the social relations were defined and compressed within the Danwei system. It constitutes a target of the market transformation, as it is logically not compatible with the profit-seeking marketing economy which China has been pursuing, especially since the 1990s. On the one hand, there has been profound efficiency-driven reform, in the process of privatizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which caused a large scale of laid-off workers, who are facing precarious situations. It also became a major source of social unrest. On the other hand, non-state socioeconomic spaces and power vacuums kept emerging during market transition. On top of that, there were pervasive challenges and social problems caused by urban sprawl and gentrification. All these have come together to demand new stability-keeping mechanisms and new forms of governance and participation. In this context, geographically-defined communities become a kind of convenient soft-landing platform to take over the functions previously played by the Danwei system and to re-establish the state-individual linkage.
I think the structural transformation in the late 1990s brought about a new reality which I called “fragmented urban socialism” – a condition in which the socialist state power structure and mentality are still there, but the organizational control anchored in the Danwei system is no longer effective or relevant in managing a market-based pluralistic and sometimes unorganized society. It is this new reality that has triggered the response of community-based governance in urban China. This is essentially a process of shifting power and resources from the previous socialist institution Danwei system to a more or less decentralized and territory-based system by revitalizing the local institutions and grassroots networks as the third tier in the urban governance. In Shanghai, the third-tier community governance is claimed under the municipal and district levels of government. The rationale is to deliberately engage the residents and other stakeholders into a localized governing infrastructure where policy implementations, community services, and problem-solving can be more inclusive, effective, and somehow more participatory.
This reform is very incremental, and not in a uniform or smooth process at all. You have a national level of policy planning, which identified 26 pilot cases of urban community-building from 1999, but I think it’s quite a muddling-through project. The central government sets up some big statements and national guidelines, and allows localized experiments. Then you get some degree of policy learning and policy transfer.
As a result of this incremental reform and diverse local experiments, I don’t think urban community building has produced or crystallised a consistent concept of citizenship or urban citizenship. In the pre-reform era, there was a limited form of industrial citizenship within the Danwei system. Workers of the state-owned entrepreneurs and urban residents as a whole were recognized as legitimate stakeholders, according to the socialist ideology. But an effective and essential civic community would require autonomy, shared interests, and sufficient public spirit. These conditions have not yet been well developed in post-reform urban China. It’s also important to notice that civic participation needs to be projected not only in the policy implementation process but also in the decision-making process. In other words, if community governance is all about policy implementation and administrative engagement instead of decision-making or agenda-setting, there are inherent limitations to participation.
Overall, I think the transformation is a process involving multiple alternatives. In general, there is a trend toward not a liberal concept of citizenship as familiar in the West, but citizenship based on relational and bonded autonomy. Our fieldwork and previous research suggest that citizens are often allowed to maintain certain aspects of individual autonomy and ownership, and they are encouraged to pursue moral roles to be parts of social relations, public obligations and collective responsibility. If you read the slogan of the community building – “community is our bigger home which is co-created by all of us”, it’s quite clear that it aspires to a kind of relational and collective form of citizenship.
Dario Castiglione: Many thanks for this fascinating analysis, which raises lots of sociological and ethical issues about the formation of citizenship and the different models of citizenship. Carrying on our discussion on citizenship from a more theoretical perspective and the same article mentioned earlier on, you use and discuss different ways in which certain kinds of possibilities for citizens to have autonomous roles. You refer to the ideas of civil society, spontaneous order and also community. In the West, these three concepts, although sometimes overlap, they are developed in quite distinctive theoretical and ideological traditions. You seem to combine them in your analysis, and this may seem a bit more difficult from a Western theoretical perspective. I wonder whether you see this as a reflection of the Chinese view of these three concepts, or do you think they can be combined regardless? And also, whether the way in which the Chinese experience that you have been describing can also be interesting, theoretically and practically, as a kind of model to compare with other traditions and the West in particular?
Chunrong Liu: thank you, Dario, for these truly provoking remarks. The starting point of my humble paper, as you mentioned, is to offer a normative reflection of community building in China with a new theoretical positioning of the community as a spontaneous order under what we call “organic statism”.
In the Sinophone literature, community is also framed in different lines of political thoughts as in the West. I think one line of the strong conventional wisdom is to see the community as a targeted area of state building, modern state formation and state penetration, and a container of infrastructure power. I’m not quite satisfied with this approach. Community can certainly be conceptualised in various ways, as a form of civil society or spontaneous order, but there is no easy recipe to bring them together and to a settled definition. I’m also not very convinced with the argument of seeing community or civil society as an autonomous force against the state power or as the opposite of the constructive or designed order. Instead, I try to reason that it is possible to see spontaneous order as a dynamic or interaction, resulting from mutual engagement and coevolution of state power and community mobilizing by individuals. In this way, community become a motor of spontaneity that can be expressed in state-empowered institutions, and can thrive under authoritarianism in the principle of organic statism. In organic statism, the state must pursue and end as a common good, namely the stability of a just social order, and all the other components of the political community in the principal subsidiary should have a proper function of their own within the organic whole, so each part as a sphere of natural actions should be preserved and engaged by the state. This is the way how I think those concepts can speak to each other.
In reality, I think it’s important to recognize that the Chinese state itself is not a monolithic entity despite being very hierarchical. It consists of many sectors and actors made up of very diverse components that may have shared, confronting or even competing interests with each other, and features constant interactions with non-state actors. In this political context, it’s possible to see multiple alternatives in the development of new norms and institutions. For instance, in one of my previous research projects, we studied how, so-called institutional activists within the state, aligned with the community actors to shift the pressure from outside and to negotiate a new policy space for elder care. Such kinds of dynamics are very interesting and should deserve further enquiries. This also means that we should be sufficiently reflective in applying or travelling theories to the Chinese case – instead, we would rather pursue a more inside-out and inductive theorizing approach.
Bingshu Zhao: One of the things we found interesting that emerges from your study of community building in Shanghai is the way in which membership of neighbourhood communities has radically changed for many demographic reasons. This is supposed to be a somewhat natural process in many communities in modern society, but your analysis suggests that in the case of Shanghai, this has brought more radical effects in terms of lifestyle and types of communication: for instance, younger generations and families come to and settle down in Shanghai, their interests may be different from the older generations and the very local “Shanghainese”; the spread of online communication and organisation; the use of social media. Also, I recalled what you mentioned in the former question, “fragmented urban socialism”, and at the same time, in the grassroots practice, we can see a wide usage of ideas like our community is our big family to build up a kind of relational collective membership. Could you tell us more about these changes and their effects? Also, perhaps whether the Covid-19 pandemic has produced other changes? Have these effects constructed the new features of grassroots governance and community building?
Chunrong Liu: thanks for these sharp observations. Population ageing is a huge change in Chinese society and has enormous policy implications, certainly for the future of community life.
First of all, when it comes to community participation and local governance, elderly people have always been one of the policy priorities. They are marginalized, vulnerable, and community-dependent – many of them are the victims of the Danwei system. These are the “subjects” that should be morally taken care of by the socialist state in order to avoid a legitimacy crisis.
In recent years, you may also notice that there have been lots of new developments and initiatives in the community-based care infrastructure. Shanghai, in particular, has been introducing a 15-minute liveable concept, namely to put all the necessary core services and resources like hospitals, shopping facilities, and non-profit “community canteen” within 15 minutes walkable distance. The aim is to make the communities more liveable and more environmental by reducing carbon emissions.
On the other hand, there is an ideational change, especially in cities like Shanghai which is becoming a heavily aged society and where traditional filial piety is declining with the changing family structure. A new policy thinking is that senior people are not always socioeconomic burdens; they can also be resources and assets to the society. For instance, relatively younger elderly can be a helping hand to elder people and can form mutual help groups and contribute to community solidarity. They can also fill some service gaps and voluntary groups in the community. The concept of active ageing and healthy ageing has now been quite established in the local governance, at least in Shanghai, as I observed.
When it comes to the younger generations, their behaviours and attitudes towards community institutions, the gap is quite obvious, and they are not new. In our research findings, most elected neighbourhood councils or resident committee members are mostly elder people, retired people, and females. They tend to be more active in community social life, for instance, involving conflict mediation and in voluntary groups. There is a similar, probably a converging pattern if you look into grassroots participation from a comparative perspective. For instance, in Japan, which is also a heavily aged society, neighbourhood communities are much more engaged by the elderly instead of the younger people.
The question here is why the younger generations tend to stay away from community participation and why they often adopt a sceptical or cynical view towards grassroots politics. There are lots of possible explanations for this phenomenon. We can naturally explain this as a generational and cultural difference. It is widely recognized that the “Gen Z”, or the Zoomers, is relatively more individualist and more likely to celebrate a kind of post-materialist values and norms. You may also know about the so-called “Tangping” culture, a lying flat attitude among a growing amount of “Gen-Z”s. (See also “Goblin Mode”, the new Oxford word of 2022, which refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”).
Also, you talked about social media. It seems that social relations of the younger generation increasingly gravitate towards virtual communities, and many of them tend to embrace a kind of simple, sometimes frugal and lonely life. Of course, there are notable variations on the ground. Indeed, our research reveals that younger generations are not always self-isolated from community participation. In some neighbourhoods, middle-class professionals and resourceful citizens can also actively participate in “everyday politics”. This happens if participation can provide both symbolic and instrumental benefits to them.
And pandemic, as you mentioned, is also an important factor adding to the complexity of community engagement. I think China’s state-sponsored neighbourhood organization (“Juweihui”) or Resident Committees remain a strong pillar for state policy implementation and social support to residents during the lockdown, but they also become targets of contention. It’s very interesting to make sense of community responses to the pandemic and pandemic-related restrictions. One thing I found particularly intriguing is those very vibrant mutual aid groups, so-called “Tuanzhang”, or group-buying coordinators. They set up the supply chain for their communities after the lockdown when the state-led organizations could not fill their needs and demands. These new forms of community organizations developed very quickly, and there were also a significant number of contentions and complaints around that – as we observed from a distance.
Bingshu Zhao: A final question would be, from what you have explored, could the Shanghai experience provide a lesson to China as a whole or further speak to a broader context?
Chunrong Liu: Despite important similarities, variations of community governance are remarkable across China, even within Shanghai. While some cases exhibit civic and voluntary participation, others witness a growth of the clientelist network. The variety is not only associated with different community resources and problems, social fabrics and institutional constellations but also result from perceptions and strategic choices of community organizers.
To put Shanghai in a broader context, scope conditions should not be underestimated. When I did fieldwork out of Shanghai, very often, local officials and community organizers were curious to learn about Shanghai’s experiences. I like to say that Shanghai is quite an exceptional case, and every community is different. Shanghai arguably features a very complex trajectory from the Danwei system to community-based governance. This political-institutional change can be quite different from other cities with various initial conditions. For instance, Shenzhen is a much “younger” city without so many social problems (and legacies) left over from history. Therefore, we should keep maintaining sensitivity to the causes and consequences of local variations. In a way, one may say there is “one country, many systems of emerging self-governance”.