Abstract
In China, the People’s Congress Representative Liaison Stations in Residents’ Communities (hereafter “the Liaison Station”), piloted by the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress as grassroots governance innovation in 2005, have been rapidly replicated nationwide in recent years. In 2012, the Liaison Stations were officially mentioned and promoted in the Report of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party. The Liaison Stations are therefore considered as a People’s Congress permanent agency within the Residents’ Communities, with office, staff, budget, and online platform. Based on data collected through face-to-face interviews with staff members at the Liaison Stations in Shenzhen as well as data retrieved from the local Congress official websites, this paper will describe how these Liaison Stations work in reality. In particular, I argue that “social currency exchange” could be used to explain why the Representatives respond to their constituencies, instead of the motivation to win another term. During the process of “social currency exchange”, four critical actors are involved: Representative, voter, residential committee, and higher-level government. After analyzing the interaction among them, I find that the role of grassroots People’s Congress Delegates in urban China are not as political as they are supposed to be; rather, they play the role more as an engagement device for grassroots urban governance, which could be chosen by the residential committee out of their toolbox.
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