1950년대 北京 街道 ‘공간’과 居民委員會의 작동 방식

Abstract

Focusing on the formation of neighborhood space, the connotation of ‘autonomy(自治)’ and the problem of governmental leadership, this article examines the mode of operation of the residents’ committees in the 1950s Beijing. Though it was under the state initiative and leadership that the residents’ committee could be established and thereby playing the roles of auxiliary administrative function, its ‘autonomy’ was also based on social capital newly created by the ‘production of space’ of neighborhood(街道) within which several small size residents’ committees could closely interact with residents, enhancing the communitarian cohesion, sociability and voluntarism between resident members. The residents’ committee both placed under the state leadership and based on its own social interaction implemented various ‘neighborhood works’ ‘autonomously’ to provide the residents with various urban services. In this sense, the ‘autonomy’ of the residents’ committee had its particular connotations of self-reliance, self-regulation and self-solution rather than independence of or opposition to the state. The ‘neighborhood works’ charged by the residents’ committee were burdensome due to excessive works under the lack of effective governmental leadership. The communist regime in its early stage in the 1950s had no sufficient resources to expand state organ to the basic level of administration, which accordingly requires the residents’ committee as non-governmental organization not only to implement state-projected works but also to carry out itself neighborhood level’s various welfare tasks. The term “mangluan”(忙亂working in rush and getting into a muddle) frequently mentioned in th governmental investigation reports reflects overfull works undertaken by the residents’ committees. This state-society relationship in the 1950s could be defined as a sort of governance rather than coercive and surveillant totalitarian rule absorbing the atomized society into state system, a governance in which the state leads societal ‘autonomy’ and/or the societal autonomy functions under the state leadership. The process of strengthening the state power in the 1950s could be materialized not by the expansion of the state organs to the basic level of urban society, but by the governance through which societal positive response to and cooperation with the state policy could be put into place.