Community Intermediary Organizations, Urban Grassroots Governance In China

With a constant urbanization in China, there are more people living in more cities. This caused the changes in the way people live, move, work and be organized. In China, the streets and communities used to be controlled by the government individually, but now, more and more citizens or organizations composed by community members involved in the management process. In the areas where government does not have the capability to manage, there are some organizations composed of community members start to emerge. These organizations become the bridge between government and citizens. In one hand, they aggregate the benefit of the community members together so that it turn to be a very strong power to fight, negotiate and cooperate with other organizations, such as government, companies as well as other NGOs. On the other hand, government starts to rely on these organizations to run the city properly. A lot of scholars and managers in government realize these organizations to have a very special meaning to the city management. They name this kind of organization as "Community Intermediate Organization" (CIO). There are a lot of kinds of CIO. Author believes that the most typical kind is the one which represent the interests of the community members, such as the Owners' Committee. In this paper, the author will analyze a case of Owners' Committee in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Through the set-up process of this Owners' Committee, the author tries to explain the background, characteristics, setbacks and advantages of these Community Intermediate Organizations. In the end, the author tries to give out some suggestions to the China City CIOs some suggestions for their future development based on the theory and fact analysis.