The party has struggled to maintain its once ever-watchful presence in urban neighbourhoods
are familiar with a poem by Mao Zedong called “Farewell to the god of plague”. It was written in 1958 to celebrate the country’s victory over snail fever, a disease that blighted the lives of many millions of people in China . Today that poem is recalled by officials in their fight against covid-19, because this, too, has involved mobilising citizens on a massive scale, and also to great effect.
Lockdown in the neighbourhoods, now all but lifted in most cities, was not a matter simply of telling residents to stay at home. It involved deploying armies of people to act as guards, health monitors, helpers for the infirm and procurers of supplies. Central to these efforts were two organisations: residents’ committees and neighbourhood party committees . The “two committees”, as they are often called, had their heyday in the Mao era as enforcers of the party’s will.
But with each neighbourhood having only a handful of permanent staff to monitor and help hundreds of people, manpower was far from adequate. So the party called in reinforcements, including party members, local officials and volunteers. In many neighbourhoods “temporary party committees” were created to oversee these efforts, headed by officials from higher levels of the urban bureaucracy.
This has long been a worry. In the 1990s, when many state-owned enterprises closed down, so too did the firms’ party branches. Alongside the neighbourhood party committees, these had played a vital role in maintaining the party’s grip. Most of the new private firms that began to spring up did not have party organisations embedded within them. Neither did the homeowners’ associations that formed in the middle-class blocks of flats.
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