Services and surveillance during the pandemic lockdown: Residents’ committees in Wuhan and Beijing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of Wuhan, and strict control was imposed in many major Chinese cities, including the national capital of Beijing. Residents’ committee workers at the grass-roots level have played a critical role in the enforcement of the government’s pandemic prevention and control measures, through their day-to-day service and surveillance as local community managers. This article examines their work in Wuhan and Beijing neighbourhoods during the most critical periods of the outbreak, from late January to June 2020, and the challenges the workers faced as executors of the government’s community-based prevention policy. The two cities have developed different community strategies because of very different epidemiological situations and city functions.

Keywords

services surveillance pandemic lockdown residents’ committee Wuhan Beijing

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of Wuhan, and strict control was imposed in many major Chinese cities, including the national capital of Beijing. Nine million residents in Wuhan municipality in Hubei Province of Central China were locked down from 23 January to contain the spread of virus from the city, after about five million of its residents reportedly left during the previous couple of weeks for Chinese New Year family reunions in their hometowns. Around this time, an estimated eight million residents of Beijing, the national capital, had also left their city. Residents’ committee workers at the grass-roots level have played a critical role in the enforcement of the government’s pandemic prevention and control measures, through their day-to-day service and surveillance as local community managers.¹ The vital role of residents’ committees in pandemic control was stressed by Xi Jinping himself – ‘Pandemic prevention has two battlefields: the hospitals where patients’ lives are saved, and the local residential communities where the spread of the virus must be prevented. Persistent pandemic prevention predominantly relies upon the work at the community level.’² The emerging literature on COVID-19 responses with regard to pandemic control and prevention has documented the importance of residents’ committees as policy implementers at the grass-roots level.³ This article adds to this body of work by elaborating more nuanced details, in particular from the perspectives of residents’ committee workers. We also provide a comparative analysis of the roles of Wuhan and Beijing residents’ committee workers from late January to June 2020, and the different challenges faced, given the varied epidemiological situations and city functions of Wuhan and Beijing.

The Chinese ‘community’ is a basic urban governance unit under the jurisdiction of the sub-district (town-level) government, which is the lowest level of administration in the five-tier Chinese government system.⁴ At its core is the residents’ committee which is, by law, a self-governing social organization of urban residents first established in 1949.⁵ In practice the residents’ committee works more as an agent of the sub-district government, and thus exhibits characteristics of a street-level bureaucracy.⁶ In more recent times, from the early 2000s onward, its function has been extended to assisting the state in the provision of social services to residents, in an area accommodating around 2000 families.⁷ The residents’ committee consists of a director (concurrent party secretary), a vice-director (concurrent vice-party secretary), five to nine ‘mass assistants’ (群干) elected by residents, and five to seven ‘professional assistants’ (专干) recruited through examinations organized by the district government, resulting in a total strength of 10 to 16 workers per residents’ committee.⁸ Funding comes mostly from the government, including workers’ stipends, operational expenses, and an office.

Given its hybrid nature, as a state agent as well as a self-ruling residents’ organization, the residents’ committee has a complex modus operandi, exhibiting features of ‘top–down control’ as part of the larger party-state control apparatus⁹ as well as ‘technical, social, and institutional complexity’, leaving abundant space for discretion in its daily business.¹⁰ With many entrusted responsibilities and yet limited formal administrative powers and resources, residents’ committee workers respond to work demands with various coping strategies similar to other street-level bureaucrats.¹¹ Given the emphasis on the community level in China’s infection control strategy, understanding the community-level response is imperative to a better understanding of the Chinese response to COVID-19 challenges.

The next section outlines the community-based infection control policy and measures in Wuhan and Beijing. Then we examine the key features of the roles of residents’ committee workers during the pandemic in Wuhan and Beijing for any remarkable differences, and we identify their major challenges. We conclude with a discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 control measures on residents’ committee workers’ work as street-level bureaucracies and their exercise of discretion. Data used in this article draw on government documents, media reports, field interviews, and personal observations. Three of the authors lived in either Wuhan or Beijing at the time of the outbreak of the pandemic, and they experienced first-hand the pandemic prevention process. To document the work of residents’ committee members during pandemic prevention, we collected data from different information channels, such as online news and personal posts on SinaWeibo and WeChat platforms, and official news reports in traditional venues. Fieldwork was seriously constrained under the COVID-19 conditions, but we managed to interview about a dozen residents’ committee workers in different roles (director, vice-director, or member) at different communities (old and new, open access and gated) in different districts of Wuhan and Beijing. These interviews were instrumental to a deeper understanding of the local responses in varied pandemic prevention situations. As far as possible, we triangulated the information collected through different channels to enhance reliability and validity.

Community-based prevention policy and measures

Central policy

On 20 January 2020, the National Health Commission of China issued Announcement No. 1 which incorporated COVID-19 into Class B infectious diseases as prescribed in the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases. Meanwhile, the government stepped up anti-infection measures and immediately adopted the measures for treating Class A infectious diseases.¹² In addition to emergency medical treatment, a ‘community-based prevention’ strategy was soon put in place. At the core is the enforcement of social distancing and isolation measures in the local neighbourhoods which were executed mostly by residents’ committee workers. On 24 January, the day after Wuhan started a three-month citywide lockdown, a central directive announced the establishment of an infection prevention team in every urban residents’ committee nationwide with two objectives: (1) providing infection control support services for residents, and (2) enforcing surveillance over residents’ movements for contact tracing.¹³ A week later, a range of community-level ‘semi-closed management’ measures were announced.¹⁴ These included the construction of additional fencing around the community area to demarcate boundaries, the issue of special permits to control the movements of residents and visitors, and body temperature checks at community entrances.

As Figure 1 shows, Wuhan’s total caseload increased exponentially from several hundred during late January to almost 50,000 in early March 2020. Cumulated infected cases nationwide spiked from 830 on 23 January to 80,026 by 1 March. This led the central government to double down on strict community prevention measures in late February.¹⁵ Wuhan’s confirmed cases, as a share in the national total, peaked at 61.8 per cent on 8 March. As of 30 June, Wuhan’s total caseload was 59.04 per cent of the national total of 50,340 cumulated cases. With the stepped-up containment measures, daily new cases dived below 10 in Wuhan from 11 March, and below 20 nationally. Work and social activities gradually resumed and the nationwide community-based prevention was relaxed from early May.¹⁶ Beijing had a low and flat curve throughout, with 595 total cases as of 11 June before the Xinfadi wet market outbreak led to a surge in the cumulated totals to 922 by 30 June, which was 1.08 per cent of the national total, or just under 2 per cent of Wuhan’s.

Figure 1.

Cumulated infected cases in mainland China, Wuhan and Beijing.

Local measures

Preventive actions at the city and community levels varied between Wuhan and Beijing (see Figure 2), reflecting differences in the severity of the outbreak and city functions. Since Wuhan was the epicentre, daily or even more frequent responses were required to keep pace with the volatile circumstances and the voluminous demands for help from hospitals and communities. Two tiers of lockdown measures were applied to contain the spread of the virus. First was the ‘sealing off’ of the city of Wuhan from the rest of the country, which started on 23 January 2020. The second saw severe measures applied at the community level to cut off any possible infection links between local neighbourhoods. In the case of Beijing, which accounted for fewer than 1 per cent of the total cases nationwide, the city aimed at preventing any importation of the virus into the city and its communities, especially after economic activities resumed in late February. Beijing’s measures were also more ‘bureaucratic’, when compared to Wuhan’s emphasis on service provision to residents under lockdown, with more use of formal government directives mirroring, sometimes word for word, the central ones.

Figure 2.

Core measures of community-based prevention by the central government, Beijing municipal government, and Wuhan city government.

Wuhan: Complete lockdown

At 10 a.m. on 23 January, Wuhan underwent a citywide lockdown. All city public transport ceased services. All highways were closed. All travel out of Wuhan by air, land, or river was banned.¹⁷ Two days later, the use of taxis and private cars within the city was also forbidden. Each residents’ committee was allocated three to five specially approved taxis for essential transportation of sick residents to hospitals, the use of which was to be coordinated by residents’ committee workers. A Wuhan government decree instructed residents’ committees to check all residents’ body temperature. Residents with a fever would be sent to community health stations for further assessment to decide whether they would be sent to hospitals.¹⁸ From 24 January till 10 February, only one resident per family was allowed to leave the local community for two hours every three days to shop for food and other essentials. From 11 February, in view of the continuous escalation of the daily new cases, Wuhan entered a period of total lockdown, which prohibited residents from leaving their community,¹⁹ a situation which lasted until 8 April when Wuhan reopened.

Beijing: Protecting the national capital

Beijing’s key preoccupation is to prevent the spread of the virus into the capital by strictly restricting and monitoring returnees and potential cases, especially those from the pandemic centres at home (namely, Wuhan) and abroad. The objective is to minimize possible imported cases and to keep the national capital safe. A Community Prevention and Control Work Plan was released by the municipal government on 30 January.²⁰ It involves identifying the potential sources of infection outbreak and then shutting them out of the city. Starting from 2 February, no visitor was allowed into the communities.²¹ To delay residents from returning to their city after the Chinese New Year, the official resumption of work was extended for 10 days beyond the original spring festival holiday, and checkpoints at Beijing’s highway entries and exits were erected.²² The residents’ committee would register the personal travel information of any returnees, who would also be placed in home isolation for two weeks. An outbreak in the Xinfadi wet market, in Fengtai District of southern Beijing, in mid-June led to a complete lockdown of 12 communities near the market and mass testing of over 11 million residents across Beijing by 6 July. A total of 335 new cases were detected.²³

Pandemic roles and challenges of residents’ committee workers

There was a total of 1406 and 3231 residents’ committees in Wuhan and Beijing, respectively, as of 2019. With 10 to 16 residents’ committee workers in each committee on average, in addition to another 16 volunteers/seconded staff recruited during the pandemic, a total of 140,000 plus workers have taken care of much of the actual work involved in the fight against COVID-19 in the two cities with a combined population of 35 million. On the front line of pandemic prevention, residents’ committee workers collaborated closely with local police, community health centres, and other local social services organizations. The major pandemic tasks revolved around service provision and community surveillance.

Table 1 depicts the pre-pandemic roles of residents’ committee workers, and it compares them to the roles in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows that in both periods, the roles entailed service provision and surveillance, but the focuses of the services and the scope and object of surveillance were largely different. The daily routines of residents’ committee workers before the pandemic involved a wide range of tasks assigned by the upper-level government agencies, including law and policy promotion, family planning, petitions, low-income family subsidy, and keeping an eye on possible social stability risks. They normally spent most of their duty hours at the office attending to paperwork. Interactions with residents were at best intermittent. With the COVID-19 outbreak, all the services and surveillance duties in the community, from policy promotion to resolving conflicts between residents, revolved around a single purpose of pandemic containment and prevention. For example, instead of publicizing new regulations on garbage classification or new provisions on low-income subsidy, the focus during the pandemic in 2020 was on publicizing the COVID-19-related measures and general knowledge of infectious disease prevention.

Table 1.

Roles of residents’ committee workers, pre-pandemic and during the pandemic.

	Pre-pandemic roles	Pandemic roles
Services	Policy promotion and publicity (various laws and policies, community governance)	Policy promotion and publicity (legal education and health education on COVID-19; daily pandemic information)
	Policy execution (various policy measures, e.g. family planning, youth education, re-employment of laid-off workers, subsistence allowance, allowances for disabled servicemen and the families of revolutionary martyrs and servicemen, relief for needy and handicapped residents, services for the unemployed and elderly)	Policy execution (public area disinfection and health management; transportation of patients; medical and essential supplies to households; support to the needy; counselling; application of nucleic acid tests)
	Community organizing (the resident representatives’ conference, community activities, community NGOs)	Community organizing (volunteer activities, community NGOs)
Surveillance	Monitoring ex-prisoners, medical/parole prisoners, probation prisoners, drug takers, petitioners, hoodlums with social stability risks	Identifying the cases; monitoring isolated and quarantined residents; checking body temperature as part of pandemic control and prevention
	Management of resident information (basic information registration, e.g. permanent and temporary residents)	Management of residents’ information (health, mobility, and relevant personal information collection of all residents)
	Conflict resolution (residents’ conflicts, conflicts involving residents and property management or residents and enterprises, follow-up on the Mayor’s Hotline)	Conflict resolution (conflicts arising from the pandemic)
	Managing the residents’ committee’s property	Temporary personnel supervision (work allocation and evaluation; party members management; motivation and reward)

Sources: 中华人民共和国城市居民委员会组织法; 关于加强新型冠状病毒感染的肺炎疫情社区防控工作的通知; interviews with residents’ committee workers on 22 and 31 May 2020 and 18 February 2021 in Wuhan; and interviews with residents’ committee workers on 23 February 2020 and 3 and 28 May 2020 in Beijing.

As already discussed, the different epidemiological situations in Wuhan and Beijing have led to different control responses. Wuhan was placed under complete lockdown with a virtual standstill in socio-economic activities from 23 January until 8 April 2020. Beijing practised stringent screening on incomers whilst keeping facilities open. Correspondingly, residents’ committee workers in Wuhan and Beijing also exhibited differences in their pandemic-related work (Table 2). Residents’ committee workers in Wuhan undertook a broader range of tasks than their counterparts in Beijing. Due to the urgency of the situation in early 2020, residents’ committee workers in Wuhan did not have prior training before they were deployed to carry out infection control. It was only later that informal online training (psychological courses, prevention, and test handbook/guidelines) was available for residents’ committee workers nationwide.

Table 2.

Roles of residents’ committee workers in Wuhan and Beijing during the pandemic.

		Wuhan	Beijing
Services	Updating case information in the community	Tracking confirmed/suspected/death/quarantined cases at each building; differentiating between hospitalized cases and those under home isolation; logging the isolation/quarantine period of each case
	Communication with hospitals	Available hospital beds	Not applicable
	Community legal and health education and promotion	Legal education and promotion on public health emergency law and rules; COVID-19 health education	COVID-19 health education
	Arranging transportation	Arranging taxi and bus transport for residents to hospitals	Not applicable
	Environmental health management	Disinfection and sanitation in communal areas	Execute the ‘patriotic sanitation campaign’: organize sanitation activities for communal areas
	Arranging for essential supplies	Medical and household supply (organizing group purchases, volunteer buying medicine for residents); assistance to stranded visitors; free food to elderly/disabled residents	Not applicable
	Pacifying emotions of residents	Counselling and emotional support	Not applicable
	Organizing mass nucleic acid tests	The whole city	Only suspected and infected communities during the June 2020 outbreak
Surveillance	Information management	Health, mobility and collection of relevant personal information of all residents	Health and mobility information of those residents returning from overseas or other parts of the country
	Community pandemic prevention	Identifying suspected cases and fever cases through self-reported body temperature; monitoring isolated and quarantined residents; checking body temperature of residents daily
	Conflict resolution	Conflicts between residents and between residents and community workers due to the scarcity of resources	Conflicts between the community and returnees
	Personnel supervision	Work allocation and evaluation of the temporary staff; motivation and reward	Party member management; motivation and reward

Services

One day-to-day responsibility of residents’ committee workers in both Wuhan and Beijing was the tracking of pandemic-related health information in their respective communities, including the number of confirmed, suspected, and quarantined cases at each building, the balance of isolation or quarantine period of each case, and the number of deaths. The information was released through public posting and text messaging to update residents on the local pandemic situation, and to remind residents to remain vigilant. Residents’ committee workers found themselves playing the role of de facto educators disseminating the latest legal and health updates in relation to the new disease. Because hospital beds were in short supply in Wuhan, especially during the peak of the outbreak in February, residents’ committee workers played a crucial go-between role between residents who were sick and the medical wards in hospitals. Facilitating the communication between the two sides, these workers were often the ones to inform sick residents when a hospital bed was available. All conventional means of transport had halted in Wuhan. Each residents’ committee was allocated three to five taxis which its workers could deploy to arrange essential trips for residents, usually to hospitals, health centres, or funeral homes.

Providing essential supplies such as food, household groceries, and medicine to residents was a major preoccupation of residents’ committee workers in Wuhan. The scale of work was enormous since all residents became dependent on residents’ committee workers for their day-to-day needs in the situation of complete lockdown. In addition to the dozen or so community staff, resident volunteers and staff of local NGOs were recruited to provide the necessary manpower support. However, it was not easy to satisfy the needs of all residents. One Wuhan female resident won the praise of netizens and was famously known as the ‘Wuhan sister-in-law’ for her critiques of residents’ committee workers and a major chain supermarket, Zhongbai Supermarket, for their ‘substandard’ performance and services during the pandemic. She criticized residents’ committee workers’ dereliction of duty and the supermarket’s ‘tie-in’ sale strategy, which induced residents to buy commodities they did not actually need.²⁴ From the perspective of the community workers, some residents were especially difficult to deal with. For example, it was almost impossible to negotiate with elderly residents, for whom all that mattered was having their specific needs met.

There are many elderly residents here. It is hard to satisfy their special needs during the lockdown period. . . . Once an elderly resident wanted to eat sugar-free steamed buns, but all shops were closed. Eventually a volunteer offered to make the buns at home.²⁵

In comparison, residents’ committee workers in Beijing had a relatively lighter load in service provision. Unlike the total lockdown in Wuhan, the semi-closed community management in Beijing neighbourhoods allowed mobility in and out of the community. Residents could go in and out to work or to shop, subject to body temperature checks at the community gates.

Residents’ committee workers also worked to meet the emotional needs of the residents. In Wuhan, these workers often received calls from residents late in the night requesting hospital or funeral home transportation. Or it could be an urgent need for medicine, listening to residents share their fear or frustration, or attending to a complaint. Residents’ committee workers would seek to calm the emotions by emphasizing the lighter side of the situation, such as the low death rate of the disease. Working overtime became a routine. Interestingly, in Beijing, residents’ committee workers did the opposite, because they had to stress the severity of the pandemic and the complexity of quarantine arrangements and discourage residents who had left Beijing before the pandemic from returning. In Wuhan, mass testing was considered instrumental to check the spread of the virus, and given the high infection rate, this was a priority and the task fell onto residents’ committee workers to mobilize all residents. In May 2020, residents’ committee workers in Wuhan were tasked with ensuring that all residents participate in the citywide nucleic acid testing. Beijing communities did not implement such tests until the outbreak in Xinfadi wet market in June.

Surveillance

Residents’ committee workers in both cities were charged with a duty to collect, register, check, and report all residents’ personal information (detailed address, telephone number, identity card number, age, sex, body temperature, recent mobility history) in order to track the cases and trace the close contacts (mainly their family members). Those who were suspected to be sick would self-isolate at home before a hospital bed was available. In Beijing, returning residents with a travel history to Wuhan were sent to hotels for quarantine. Residents’ committee workers in both cities had to monitor closely the quarantined residents, whether at home or in hotels. In Wuhan, residents’ committee workers monitored the body temperature of all residents daily by telephoning each family and visiting the disabled/elderly residents. In Beijing, body temperatures would be taken at the community gates when residents moved in and out of the communities. Mediation of conflicts was a major part of the work especially in Wuhan, because tension could run high amongst residents, and because of disagreements between residents and the community management over the allocation of hospital beds and nucleic acid test quota. Sometimes police intervention was required. Compared to Beijing, there was a larger fleet comprising seconded grass-roots-level government officials as well as temporary staff and volunteers recruited from diverse local bodies in Wuhan communities, because of the heavier workload in the latter city. In order to motivate residents’ committee workers, reward and punishment schemes were adopted in both cities.

Challenges

The pandemic brought along dire challenges to residents’ committee workers, which can be categorized into three types: first, high stakes and pressure; second, shortage of resources and manpower; and third, conflicts with residents.

High stakes and pressure

In the early stage of the 2020 pandemic, there was very little knowledge of the disease. The steep climb in case numbers caused grave anxiety amongst residents’ committee workers and residents, especially in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak. The pressure of work and the high stakes were unprecedented. In ordinary times, the resident information collected is not fine-grained. Collection of information normally relies upon the residents’ voluntary reporting, and the information is rather broad-brushed and not detailed. ‘Actually, [before the pandemic] we did not have all residents’ personal information. We did not even know the exact number of residents, for example. But pandemic prevention required us to check each apartment and get all the information’, said a residents’ committee worker.²⁶ Having accurate and timely information during the pandemic period is considered essential to contact tracing and identification of suspect cases. Failure to do so might attract higher-level government attention and result in penalty.²⁷

Residents’ committee workers also had to deal with unexpected visitors. To quote a committee party secretary, ‘We have had some drug addicts/street ruffians coming to the office to ask for money. The pandemic affected their salary. They wanted money for drugs or cigarettes. We had to call the police.’²⁸ Residents’ committee workers resorted to e-communication platforms in WeChat and QQ groups to secure information, often with repeated reminders, supplemented with home visits to the elderly and disabled. The employment of new technologies saved residents’ committee workers from arduous tasks and improved the efficiency of their work.

Our community is very large. It was impossible for us to knock on each door, because many old buildings do not have elevators. To climb each floor would kill us. We established the WeChat group for residents to report their own temperature. I heard that other districts also used an AI (artificial intelligence) voice calling system, which recognizes or understands simple speech, to call each family so that family members could report their temperature through the phone.²⁹

Shortage of resources and manpower

In late January 2020, Wuhan and Beijing communities found themselves in an awkward situation: they were required to enforce the public health support measures on behalf of the government, but they had insufficient means. Their respective local governments did not provide them with a steady supply of masks and protective suits, and getting the equipment on their own through the market became an almost impossible mission in January and February. This posed immense difficulties since residents’ committee workers were charged with the responsibility to scrutinize the state of health of each and every one of the residents in the communities. In addition to the shortfalls in equipment, the scale of services and surveillance work required much more manpower and time than the small teams of workers could sustain.

The central government mobilized party members and government-funded employees (including civil servants, staff in public institutions, and state-owned enterprise employees) to assist in the community lockdown or provide necessary services for residents. In Wuhan, over 44,500 party members/government employees were sent to assist in the communities till the end of February,³⁰ and thousands of residents at large were mobilized to sign up as volunteers.³¹ Similarly, a large number of volunteers were recruited in Beijing.

Conflicts with residents

Most residents cooperated with residents’ committee workers on the lockdown policy and stayed home. However, the committee workers often ran into difficulties in satisfying different requirements and needs of the residents. The shortage issues in the initial weeks of lockdown in particular generated abundant conflicts among residents, and between residents’ committee workers and residents. In Wuhan, the acute shortage of hospital beds during January 2020, for example, had caused ceaseless complaints. Under the lockdown arrangements, all residents required the permission and assistance of their residents’ committee before they could go to a hospital. Residents’ committee workers would assess the residents’ health conditions and apportion the use of available resources. During the peak of infection in February, each community was allocated only one nucleic acid test quota and one hospital bed daily – for all residents with a fever and other symptoms. Residents’ committee workers admitted that they lacked the medical knowledge to conduct the screening properly, but together with the health station staff they were the ones deciding who would be tested and sent to a hospital for treatment, and who would be sent home for self-isolation. As we learned in our field discussions, those residents acting more aggressively were more likely to be allocated a hospital bed and sent sooner to hospitals, so that residents’ committee workers would be spared from having to deal with them further.

Residents applied various strategies in order to secure a hospital bed. A daughter resorted to striking a ‘gong’ on the balcony of her home to attract public attention to her ill mother.³² Complaining at the residents’ committee office was a daily occurrence. ‘In order to get a hospital bed, some residents resorted to various disruptive actions. They would even occupy the office.’³³ In Beijing, residents’ committee workers were in a dilemma about the large number of returnees. On the one hand, residents had every right to come home; on the other hand, returnees might bring in the virus and endanger the community. Some communities simply rejected returnees, leading to clashes with the residents. Dilemmas between the pandemic rules and accustomed norms were also commonplace. One visitor came to visit his elderly parents but was rejected because he could not provide the required documentary proof. ‘Normally, as a matter of social customs and family ethics, we should welcome the son to visit his parents, but now a rule is a rule’, a residents’ committee worker in Beijing confessed to us.³⁴ To make their work easier, these workers sometimes used the legal education activities to convince residents that they had a duty to cooperate with them. Still, conflicts between residents’ committee workers and residents were frequent. For instance, many have complained of privacy infringement when the former collected their personal information.

We had a resident returning from another province. At first we did not know [about it] and he did not report to the community. Later the big data showed his travel path. We had to register his information, such as the date of return, the kind of transportation, ID number, and work unit. He was required to home quarantine for 14 days. But he refused to provide the information and insisted on his right to privacy. Finally, we called the community policeman for help.³⁵

Discussion and conclusion

Residents’ committee workers in China are not endowed with formal administrative powers despite their numerous responsibilities. By law, the residents’ committee is a self-organized entity independent from the government, not another level of government, which makes the official role of the district government in relation to the residents’ committee one of guidance and support, rather than supervision and direct leadership.³⁶ However, in practice residents’ committees are funded and supervised by the government to execute various government-assigned tasks. The severity of the COVID-19 crisis reveals in full the difficult situation faced by residents’ committee workers.

In response to the dire challenges, residents’ committee workers had to exercise discretion over seemingly minor aspects but which nonetheless had material impacts. Deciding on the number of gates to open is one example. Unlike in Wuhan where until mid-June only one entrance gate was allowed to stay open, residents’ committee workers in Beijing had the discretion over the number of entry/exit gates that could stay open. The fewer the gates, the more inconvenient it was for residents. Fewer gates also meant higher risks of infection at the gate because of crowding as well as other non-pandemic safety risks.³⁷ Having more gates open, on the other hand, might lead to a slackening of control and enhance the spread of infection. Either way, if things go wrong, the residents’ committee (and its workers) will be penalized.

We find that some residents were not satisfied with residents’ committee workers and often complained of their dereliction of duty. At the same time, these workers complained of the excessive expectations from all sides. They were exhausted from overwork, and some had even collapsed during work. Stress was apparently more acute amongst workers in Beijing communities.

I am tired too, who is not tired? I work every day from morning to night. I have had no weekend breaks for the past three months. I do not feel any excitement now, unlike what was shown on TV. I still work here because my family also live here. I need to protect them.³⁸

On the other hand, workers in Wuhan communities more often showed a sense of pride in their work:

I am paid only several thousand renminbi per month for this dangerous work. Yes, all of us – my colleagues and I – have complaints. You know, at the early stage, no preventive equipment was supplied to us. There were no masks, no protective suits, no thermometers. We bought them ourselves. We are human; we are afraid too. But when we finally won the fight [against the spread of the virus], I am proud of what I have done.³⁹

Contributing to the stress on the community workers was the heavy reliance of the many departments of the state hierarchy on residents’ committee workers for the execution of the pandemic prevention duties. One community party secretary once complained: ‘We had too many forms to fill in, which were required by different departments/bureaus. A lot of our time was spent on those forms. We even had to assign a number of younger members to work on the forms full-time.’⁴⁰ For many residents’ committee workers who also lived in the community where they worked, protecting the community from the pandemic also meant protecting their own families. Specific institutional incentives also matter, to an extent. For example, some district governments in Beijing halved the national standard subsidy to RMB 100 per day per person for residents’ committee workers. These governments expected the workers to accept the cut out of political loyalty and sacrifice.⁴¹

Services and surveillance are closely related functions. Since residents’ committee workers lacked the necessary administrative power to enforce their surveillance duties, services and persuasion were employed to achieve a desired surveillance outcome. One example is the society-wide testing for the virus in Wuhan in May 2020, after the lockdown was lifted, with the intended objective to identify any remaining cases. Wuhan municipal government had planned to complete testing all 11 million residents within two weeks, and the task was assigned to the residents’ committees. However, residents’ committee workers have no legal authority to mandate residents to take the test.

Some elderly residents were not allowed by their sons or daughters to do the test because they were worried that their parents might be infected with the virus during the test procedures. We have negotiated many times with them and their children, but failed. We could only try to persuade them.⁴²

Residents’ committee workers also guarded the community entrances. Residents passing through the entrances would be asked to produce their nucleic acid test results. Those who had not yet been tested would then be guided to take the test on the spot. In the end, about 10 million tests were conducted by 1 June, and 300 asymptomatic infections were detected.⁴³

Inspections from the upper-level governments were frequent in both cities. In Hubei Province, over 3000 officials were punished for poor performance in pandemic prevention. In Beijing, pressure from the top was disproportionately high given that cases there were only a small fraction of Wuhan’s. A government directive stated, ‘There is no small matter in Beijing, everything is related to politics.’⁴⁴ Residents’ committee workers in Beijing were expected to strictly follow government instructions to demonstrate their political loyalty and reliability. In the case of a returnee entering into a community without reporting, someone in the community must be held accountable, and penalized, for the oversight or mistake.

This article has sketched how the unprecedented challenge of COVID-19 was managed by residents’ committee workers in China during the acute months of the outbreak from January to June 2020. The outbreak in Beijing in June brings up the risk of recurrence of outbreaks despite the strictest control measures. The large knowledge vacuum and uncertainty about the behaviour of the new virus contribute to much of the challenge. At the same time, discretions abound, many of which were driven by the practical demands of the circumstances. Where resources were in short supply and where the pressure to deliver was high, residents’ committee workers creatively responded to the demands. There are finer variations in the response between and within the two cities, which might account for differentiated infection control performance. There are also questions of sustainability of the community-based response, and of the broader costs incurred. Answering these questions requires further research.

Footnotes

Notes

References

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