Social governance and the Qinghe Experiment

The Qinghe Experiment is an experiment of social science conducted by sociologists in the Qinghe area, Beijing, which combines academic research with social governance and social development. The Qinghe Experiment was first launched by the old-generation sociologists Yang Kaidao, Xu Shilian, et al. in 1928, which was mainly about rural construction, and discontinued by Japanese troops’ occupation of Peking. In 2014, the Qinghe Experiment was relaunched at the Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University. Today’s Qinghe is not as it was in the past. It has become an urban community and a rural-urban fringe zone. Now Qinghe consists of 28 neighborhood communities, including urban village communities. With extremely complicated types of communities, Qinghe can be regarded as an epitome of the evolution of Chinese urban and rural communities. According to the theoretical framework of the new Qinghe Experiment, presently the prominent problems in respect of governments, markets, and society are an insufficient growth of society and insufficient participation of community residents. Therefore, one important part of the experiment is to motivate the social vitality. Now the experiment consists of two parts, ‘social reorganization’ and ‘community improvement.’ Experiments of social reorganization and community improvement were conducted at three communities in Qinghe. Social Reorganization is to strengthen the original community residents’ committees’ social representativeness, social self-governing capacity, social vitality, and capacity of serving the residents through adding ‘discussion members’ to residents committees. Community Improvement is for using various forms of public topics and community activities to fully exert the role of residents’ committees, including the discussion members, motivate the residents to participate in the communities’ public decision making, give play to the residents’ initiative, improve the community life from many aspects, raise the level of living environment in the communities, and improve the level of community governance.