The Transformation of Community Grid Management and the Upgrade of Grassroots Governance

In previous studies, community grid management is mostly regarded as a grassroots management model with strong rigid characteristics that is based on administrative bureaucracy and extends to the community, with the goal of management and social control. In this perspective, the direct consequences of community grid management including the administrativeization of community and the fossilization of grassroots governance. But in fact, as an important method of grassroots management, community grid management is not a closed and unchanging model or system. Since its inception in the early years of the 21th century, griddization has continuously absorbed the innovative experience of local social governance, on “group service”, “three social organizations linkage” (“三社联动”) and “three heads system” (“三长制”), and has realized the transformation of multiple forms of community grid management. Different from the initial emphasis on management and social control, practitioners of community grid governance strive to incorporate flexible governance elements such as social services, social organizations, and social workers into the grid system, making the existence and characteristics of griddization change fundamentally. As a result, grassroots governance in the new era has been fully developed and upgraded, and the transformation from management to governance has been realized.