ABSTRACT
China’s rapid transformation over the past decade has generated a great deal of commentary, yet little attention has been devoted to the growing prominence of the idea of ‘community’ within public discourse in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Chinese term for community, shequ, was used by China’s first generation of sociologists in the 1930s and 1940s, but it disappeared from public discourse when the Communist Party-led government banned sociology in the early 1950s.1 The rehabilitation of sociology as a discipline in the 1980s has seen the term return to general scholarly usage (Guo 1993: 3). More importantly, perhaps, the term has found its way into official governmental discourse: first, in the mid-1980s with the promotion of ‘community services’ (shequ fuwu); and second, since the mid-1990s, with the strategy for ‘community building’ (shequ jianshe). The growing concern with the concept of community in China reflects a recent trend, apparent in a number of other polities, to re-valorize the role of community within systems of governance (Rose 1999: 167). From New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ to the New Communitarians of the American right, the ‘community’ has been presented as a resource that can be mobilized to address a wide range of political, social, ethical and economic problems. While the discussion of ‘community’ in China is situated within domestic debates around local governance and social welfare that have emerged in response to the decline of the planned economy and associated institutions, it is also informed by international discourses on community. In China as elsewhere, ‘community’ has been posited in part as a counterweight to cultural, social and political fragmentation which is often seen as a negative consequence of globalization.
