Residential communities struggle to offer services
Updated: 2011-07-14 07:41
By He Dan (China Daily)
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BEIJING - Shi Aijun, director of the residential committee at Yulinxili community in Beijing, often pays door-to-door visits to people living in her community to see what she can do to help them cope with hardships in their daily lives.
As the community continues to become larger, her work has grown increasingly demanding - especially since more migrant workers have been moving there.
To date, Shi's community contains 2,370 households and is home to 6,500 permanent residents and a floating population of about 3,000 people hailing from outside the capital city.
Sixteen full-time workers help them obtain various services from the community's residential committee, whose duties include overseeing China's family-planning policy and teaching community residents about fire prevention.
"It's not very reasonable for the government to allocate money and workers to our committees based only on the number of permanent residents in them," Shi told China Daily. "Our services for the community never exclude people who don't have Beijing hukou (permanent resident permits).
"The outsiders, once they move into our communities, we provide services to them. For example, we organize health lectures for women of childbearing age and help those who have children with school enrollment."
Chinese residential committees are overburdened with responsibilities and lack the number of staff members needed to provide the services promised to their residents, admitted Wang Jinhua, deputy director of the Ministry of Civil Affairs' department for the construction of grassroots governance and community.
On average, a single residential committee serves nearly 10,000 residents, which is about 10 times more than they had served in the 1950s, Wang said at a news conference held in Beijing on June 30.
The ministry's statistics also show that Chinese urban areas by the end of 2010 had contained about 87,000 residential committees whose members were directly elected by community residents.
Wang Wei, a 23-year-old citizen from Dongying city, East China's Shandong province, said the current election system is not well developed in his community.
"Our community holds an election once every year," Wang said. "But only the old residents have the time and interest to run."
Making matters worse, Wang said, is the fact that candidates neither give speeches nor undertake other sorts of campaigning that would let voters know more about them. The result is that people tend to support their acquaintances, which may not lead to the best results, Wang said.
Acknowledging the existence of these faults, the Chinese government has decided to amend the Organic Law on Urban Residential Committees, which took effect in 1990, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Wang said the need for the legislative amendment has become pressing, above all to ensure neighborhood committees can adapt to the changes brought about by China's urbanization and transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy.
Residential committees are now taking on more responsibility for providing social services. They, for instance, have been helping unemployed residents find jobs and providing nursing services for the old, he said.
The ministry will soon initiate a national investigation into the problems faced by residential committees and use letters and phone calls to solicit public opinions on the legal amendment, said Xu Liqun, deputy director of the ministry's department of policies, laws and regulations.
Xu Wei contributed to this story.