Abstract
Nearly a century ago, the faculty and students in the Department of Sociology at Yenching University conducted the Qinghe Experiment, including both sociological intervention practice and social surveys within the context of community study. In 2014, the faculty and students in the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University also conducted a series of field experiments in the same area, collectively known as the New Qinghe Experiment. In 2023, the 10th year of the New Qinghe Experiment, Li Qiang and other leading participants published the book, The New Qinghe Experiment, which introduced how it was designed and organized, and made an analysis attempting to reveal the mechanism of Chinese social transformation and find effective governance methods of local communities.
The New Qinghe Experiment was academically inspired by the Qinghe Experiment in the 1930s certainly, yet also differentiated by the social context of contemporary times. First, both experiments targeted the issue of social transformation, which not only clarifies the difference between China and the West but also identifies the internal change of China’s idiosyncratic social structure based on the comparison between the contemporary and the traditional. However, the New Qinghe Experiment more focused on the latter, as it was carried out in the context of post-Danwei society ( 后单位社会), which calls for more spontaneous public participation rather than administrative and market-based methods to deal with governance problems (pp. 8–10). For this reason, compared to the Qinghe Experiment’s struggle between using and breaking away from Western mode, the New Qinghe Experiment determined to seek China’s idiosyncratic answers according to a sense of cultural continuity imparted by social consciousness over time. Second, both experiments were conducted and supported by government and non-government institutions while the relationship between government and non-government institutions was different. Unlike the Qinghe Experiment, the New Qinghe Experiment was organized in close cooperation between the state and society in which subjects shared epistemic consistency (Hasmath and Hsu, 2014), no matter whether in concrete execution or fundraising, the government played an important role (pp. 376–377). Third, although both experiments were conducted in the same area, the Qinghe Experiment was concerned with the revitalization and reconstruction of rural communities, whereas the New Qinghe Experiment faced communities that possessed no more farmland and had already been urbanized (p. 2). Accordingly, the New Qinghe Experiment aimed at solving problems of urbanity such as individualization and stranger-community.
The influence on communities brought by urbanity has long been a major topic in sociological academia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Western theories and methods of community studies were introduced and practiced in China, through the collective efforts of Chinese sociologists with overseas experience, represented by Wu Wenzao (吴文藻), who ascribed localized interpretations to ‘community’ based on the paradigmatic dichotomy of ‘community’ (gemeinschaft) and ‘society’ (gesellschaft) coined by Ferdinand Tönnies, as well as Yang Kaidao (杨开道), Xu Shilian (许仕廉), and their colleagues who led the far-reaching Qinghe Experiment (1928–1937), which had resonated with Robert Park’s proposition of human ecology and the ethnographic fieldwork by other figures within the Chicago School of sociology.
Henceforth, community studies in China, as a telling and vigorous pillar of sociology, have long been of great significance for capturing social transformation, reflecting subtle details of residential activities, and serving urban planning as well as policy-making (p. 4). The New Qinghe Experiment thus has taken the fruitful achievements of community studies as one of its academic foundations, while continuing its own research of community, adopting a more flexible and inclusive perspective of understanding community as a fluidity of social relations rather than a fixed residential neighborhood (Blokland, 2017: 17–20), to reveal the zeitgeist of contemporary China that is epitomized by Qinghe subdistrict.
Urged by the methodological need to find effective approaches to organizing public affairs in communities, the New Qinghe Experiment explored undiscovered traits of Chinese society and introduced Alain Touraine’s sociology of action and Michael Burawoy’s public sociology (pp. 368–369). Moreover, a sociological intervention was incorporated as a tool for sociologists to engage themselves in the research target and hence became the other vein behind the New Qinghe Experiment. The intervention attempt was termed ‘social governance’ in the New Qinghe Experiment. It is grounded in Chinese society with unique cultural and conceptual connotations (p. 31), which again reveals its distinctive aim at cultivating residents as spontaneously vigorous actors, a complement to the top-down mechanism of governmental administration.
Covering both social transformations taking place in Qinghe through in-depth community studies and possible solutions to effectively deal with public affairs and residents’ needs in the pluralistic spatial landscape of Qinghe under a government–market–society tripartite structure (p. 76), the practices of the New Qinghe Experiment can be interpreted both in temporal and spatial dimensions.
On the temporal side, considering the prevalence of digital technologies (p. 205), the New Qinghe Experiment has kept abreast of the times by developing an interactive online map platform ‘Lu Jian Qinghe’ (Road to Qinghe, 路见清河) with the help of big data with its peripheral applications and collaboration between the local government and Qinghe residents, aiming to collect communal appeals for commuting promptly and improve the efficiency of governance at local-level (pp. 211–213).
Apart from presenting major findings by using the platform, the research team also confessed their worry concerning ‘information silo’ due to the segmentation of administrative organizations (p. 215). The anxiety was further laid out in Chapter 12 by discussing the fragmentation of the community. Compared to its original cohesiveness during the period of planned economy, Qinghe subdistrict has transformed from a Danwei-based overall society consisting of four regions into 17 fragmented areas that are relatively independent and disproportionately developed (pp. 224–226, 308–309).
One typical example is Community B, a residential quarter near Factory B that has transformed from a government-supervised and merchant-managed enterprise in the late Qing dynasty to a defense company controlled by the Nationalist government, and then restructured into a state-owned company after the ‘Three Great Remolding’ until recently exploited to build high-end commercial housing (pp. 216–217). The longitudinal flow of institutions has allowed Community B to retain many of the characteristics of a work-unit system while simultaneously bearing a bunch of marketized elements, which are adequately embodied in practices of grassroots commerce, such as the local mobile farmers’ market. The intricacy of its history and interaction among urban management, property management, farmer–greengrocer community, and residents’ committee has been calling for subtler consideration and a higher level of micromanagement (pp. 262, 318).
Studies of changes in Qinghe through the lens of temporality unearth many problems lying in public space caused by social transformations, such as the disappearance of dining halls for the elderly (pp. 266–274), outflow of previous work-unit elites (pp. 317–318), under-registration and homelessness for floating population (pp. 331–332), outdated infrastructures, perished pipelines, proliferation of occupied parking, and lack of ancillary facilities and property management services, and so on. (pp. 170, 210).
Thus, based on the discoveries reflected in the temporal branch, the New Qinghe Experiment further conducted spatial-side interventions through the empowerment of participatory actors and improvement of public affairs.
It is noteworthy that the spatiality is not only physical but also metaphysical, as stated by social theories of space that the employment of space implies power (Blokland, 2017, pp. 29), which can be embodied in the above triangular structure in China: policies have the authority to define center and periphery (pp. 312–318), market has largely reshaped Chinese housing industry through the commodification of real estate (pp. 60–61), while the social influence is reflected in deterioration of life with concomitantly residential conflicts in transitional communities. Since government, market, and society are closely intertwined and have formed a governing network, the sophisticated relationships among the three participants and the intrinsic weakness of the social side (Li et al., 2018, p. 71) have served as the theoretical foundation for sociological interventions documented in this book.
In response to the less satisfying situation, the New Qinghe Experiment has conducted several interventions on uplifting the participatory actors in communal social governance, typically through the establishment of the Center of Property Management, which serves as a consulting institution and provides guidance on community services, while incorporating a third-party organization to investigate and assess property management services. In addition, the residents’ satisfaction was taken in as a core indicator for evaluating the performance of property management providers in Qinghe (p. 198).
A similar operation can also be seen in Chapter 20, where a scale was developed to construct indicators of communal happiness. The empirical results potently showed that the operational logic behind property management or community governance goes further beyond simple market trading, containing sophisticated relational, cultural, contextual, and even emotional elements (p. 363).
In general, the New Qinghe Experiment has conducted a series of in-depth community studies as its temporal line, reflecting the social changes that Qinghe subdistrict has witnessed, while at the same time providing abundant sociological interventions, based on the trilateral governance network, as its spatial line to address the livelihood issues existed in Qinghe. The combination of describing and documenting social facts by community studies, along with reorganizing and improving society by interventions substantially unveils the true meaning of the ‘experiment’ of the New Qinghe Experiment.
Other than bringing the discussion on how to make public life in communities organized under social transformation, the New Qinghe Experiment provides a springboard for exchanging ideas on how to conduct field experiments within sociology and between other disciplines. For a start, it once again manifests the difficulty of balancing theory-driven and application-oriented methods in one experiment. As previous studies show, a field experiment can not only inform social policy but also advance theory (Baldassarri and Abascal, 2017); nevertheless, the limitation of present methods in addressing issues of generalizability and scalability weakens both theoretical findings and intervention effect. Even so, due to the origin and development of sociology in China, and also other areas (Kellogg, 1914), developing theory and practicing intervention are two inseparable goals. In the New Qinghe Experiment, resolving tensions between two goals relies on initiators themselves to make two roles (scholar and practitioner) compatible, namely acting the mediating effect both in a so-called naturally occurring context experiment and in social reality (pp. 380–386). On this point, ethical issues are a concern next. As the New Qinghe Experiment shows, the intervention planned and acted on is always non-institutional and of contingency, which may bring about unanticipated consequences, yet constrained by the experimental condition, the discussion on how to deal with this is not beyond previous studies (p. 390). Finally, the New Qinghe Experiment was designed as a longitudinal study from the very outset, which served as a way to attend to the issue of replicability. To elaborate, the longitudinal design enables deep trust between initiators and communities, thus rich data can be collected from varied levels and in different situations, which extends the possibility for other communities to refer to. Overall, the New Qinghe Experiment provides a window for us to learn about community life and understand the social transformation in China, and as a continuing career, it has the potential to reveal more underlying logic of social norms and bring more valuable discussion on methodological issues hereafter.