Text: Li Yingdi
Editor: Xie Ding
Illustrator: Orange
Translator: Ji Yuan
It was posted in Chinese initially on the China Digital Times and translated as follows,
1
How can I introduce this friend of mine? A community worker? A gridman? A grassroots service worker who directly faces the people?
If you put a map of city A in front of you, the city is divided into countless grids, and you will see my friends shuttle back and forth in a certain grid. The grid is not a real square, but five old-fashioned unit buildings, two banks, and a road about a kilometer long. Everything that happens on the grid, such as the census, epidemic prevention, the creation of a civilized city, or which house has a rat problem, which building has a light bulb that fails, cigarette butts pile up on the road, and trash cans are dumped, it has to do with my friends.
One day she called me. On the phone, my friend said in a troubled tone that she was thinking about quitting. She has been in the community for fifteen months. It was eleven o'clock at night when we were talking.
I said, did you just get off work?
"It's not bad today. Do you remember when the outbreak occurred in the Alxa League in Inner Mongolia and Zhangjiajie in Hunan? I didn't get off work until 3 am for a week!" she said.
Taking epidemic prevention as an example, what she most often does is to check the residents who pass through the grid after an epidemic occurs in a place. But sometimes, she will receive a lot of confusing data - no name, no place of residence and household registration address, only a string of phone numbers. In the week when she got off work at 3:00 a.m. for a week, her community suddenly received a notice to investigate the number of 170,000 people who came to her city from a certain place and had a history of traveling and living in their area. The reason was that there were 2 asymptomatic infected people somewhere that day. The notice emphasizes that the inspection must be in place, point-to-point, mobile phone text messages and WeChat, and then report to the community secretary, street secretary, deputy head, and head of the district in time.
That night, 170,000 phone numbers will be distributed to all communities in City A.
My friend recreated the scene of that day in a vivid tone:
In the first round, at 6:00 p.m., 100 mobile phone numbers were distributed to my friend's community and asked to report the results of the survey within fifteen minutes. It was still early, and the people on the other end of the phone were all awake. She asked them when and where they passed a certain place, whether they had been to the district where their community was located, and if so, where exactly, which street, where did they live now, and when did they plan to leave? Then, she collected the answers, made the form, and reported it.
The second round, at 9:06, continued to receive 100 phone numbers, and reported the results of the survey within 15 minutes. She and her colleagues are a little impatient, why can't they just send the phone down all at once? But no one explained this. Everyone could only stand by in the office collectively, waiting for the order from the district to be issued to the sub-district office, and the sub-district office would then issue it to the community. Leaders say the data must all be in place tonight.
In the third round, around ten o'clock, there were still 100 phone numbers.
At 11:30 in the evening, some data came again. She was a little worried, it was very late, would those people still answer the phone? She called one of them and just said, "Hello, I'm a staff member of the Epidemic Prevention Center in City A, and now I have some data to verify with you." Childhood neuropathy? Then hung up the phone.
She knew why the man scolded her. If it was her on the other side of the phone, she would also swear. But the phone still has to be made.
In the eighth round, at one o'clock in the morning, I received a notice that there were still 6,000 calls in the whole district, and they were dispatched within 15 minutes.
"It's like constipation," she said.
The eight rounds of tasks were over. After a while, the community received a notification that there would be a batch of data coming at four or five in the morning, but now everyone can go back to rest first, but be sure to follow the group news. She got home, got up after two hours of sleep, and went to work.
After hanging up my friend's phone, I started to think about what the daily life of a community worker is like. We always see him (she) on the news, and sometimes their image is not very positive, such as entering residents' homes to beat dogs, or sticking seals, locking and so on. But we seem to have to admit that, except for those extreme cases, it is often community workers who maintain China's current epidemic prevention system. In a big way, they are maintaining China's grid management. I wanted to know how it all worked out, so I came to City A and had a few long talks with my friends.
2
Forgive me for having to blur some information in this article, let's call my friend K for the time being, her city is City A, and her community is Community B.
City A has a population of more than 10 million. K was born here and grew up in the city. She is 24 years old and likes to try new things, such as watching live rappers, talk shows, or Meng Jinghui's plays. She doesn't have an impressive degree and will face some real troubles when looking for a job. Before coming to this community, she edited a variety show. At that time she was in the program editing department of a big platform. But this job is not ideal. There is no five insurances and one housing fund. When there is a project, she often stays overnight for a month, and she has never become a regular employee. She always ridiculed herself as "working underworld". Fat quickly attacked her body, and she gained about 60 pounds in a year.
Later, she resigned and stayed at home for half a year, focusing on losing weight. When her weight returned to normal, and her physical metrics returned to normal, she began to wonder if she could find a stable, relatively easy job in which she could take control of her life—in other words, a secure job.
In the fall of 2020, she joined the community after being introduced by a friend. On the first day in the community, when she walked into the office, she saw a window with a "mass reception", five seats, and two or three pine trees outside the window. She doesn't know much about what the community does exactly. However, she had previously heard that community work is to sit at a table and drink tea, mainly responsible for dealing with the masses, and it will not be very busy.
She signed a contract, but was a "temporary worker" in a sense. It took her a long time to figure out the management system of the Chinese community. The full name of the community is the community residents committee.
According to the "Organization Law of Urban Residents' Committees of the People's Republic of China", the people's governments of cities not divided into districts or municipal districts or their dispatched offices shall provide guidance, support and assistance to the work of residents' committees.
In layman's terms, in cities, communities are generally under the jurisdiction of sub-district offices—and sub-district offices are already the last layer of China's administrative organization system. According to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, as of 2021, there are 8,793 street offices in mainland China. As for communities, the Ministry of Civil Affairs also has a set of data: there are about 650,000 urban and rural communities in mainland China, with nearly 4 million urban and rural community workers, an average of 6 community workers in one community, and each community worker faces 350 residents. .
However, the community is not an administrative organ, and the staff are not staffed by civil servants or careers, but are managed according to a "post" system. If K wants to become a "post", he needs to participate in the examination and selection of district-level government organizations. She decided to start working first, while preparing for the exam.
On the first day on the job, the leader arranged the work content for her. In Chinese communities, staff members need to be responsible for two parts, one is called "line", which is responsible for connecting with different administrative agencies, and the other is called "grid", which is responsible for connecting with residents. The first is a line. For the first time, she heard that the community will involve so many fields: civil affairs, health, human society, justice, environmental protection, production safety, food safety, party building, urban management, economic development, etc. K's community has fifteen employees, each responsible for three or four lines.
What exactly are you responsible for? If you sit in K's community office for a while, you can see on the electronic screen the following things that can be done in the community:
"Applying for a Small Catering Business License
Apply for a food business license
Apply for medical insurance for urban and rural residents
Eligibility for retiree pension adoption
Apply for job registration
Apply for flexible employment social insurance subsidy
Apply for a small amount of guaranteed loan for business start-up
Apply for two allowances for disabled persons
Special assistance for the mentally ill
Corresponding materials can be provided, which will be completed by the community trial, the street preliminary trial, and the district level. "
At a friend's party, a friend asked K, what is the community doing?
She asked back, what do you think the community should manage?
A friend said, for example, do you care about the green plants on the street?
K laughed. "That is indeed our jurisdiction, but if you come, we will receive you, and then we will tell you and convince you why this tree is not under our control."
As for the grids - K's community has about 10,000 inhabitants divided into fifteen grids, one for each worker. There are about 300 households in the grid that K is responsible for. Her photo was pasted at the door of the five-unit building, with her contact information: I am a grid worker in Building xx, and I serve the people!
At the same time, meshing is associated with lines. We still take the case of epidemic prevention as an example. Whenever the district or sub-district office issues epidemic-related matters that need to be dealt with, the epidemic prevention specialists in the community are always the first to do it (this responsibility is usually undertaken by the personnel in charge of the health line) After receiving the notice, the epidemic prevention specialist will notify the grid worker in charge of the specific building, and ask the grid worker to contact the person who should take some epidemic prevention measures (such as centralized isolation, nucleic acid testing, and epidemiological investigation). Before the epidemic, the health and health line was relatively easy, mainly responsible for family planning, doing some work such as distributing free condoms. But after 2020, the employees of this line have never been idle again.
One of the lines that K gets is publicity, which is a busy line at all times. Publicity is the top priority of everything. No matter what you do, if you don't have "photograph marks" (K's professional term), it is equivalent to doing it in vain.
When he first started his job, K was very enthusiastic. She bought a thick notebook and neatly listed all the to-do items for a month on it. But a year later, she has gradually lost enthusiasm for the job, the handwriting on the notebook has gradually become scribbled, and all those trivial things have been skipped by her.
Next, we'll take a closer look at her fifteen months through K's notes.
3
2020** November, China's seventh census**
On the second day of his arrival, the leader wanted K to participate in assisting in the census. The information collection of the census needs to be completed on a software and is divided into two rounds. The first round collects more basic information, such as illiteracy rate, family size, fertility status, etc. The second round is based on the sampling of the first round. The residents who are selected will need to complete a survey of 30 to 40 items, and that survey will be more detailed.
K received a "census taker" job card. In the first round, she needs a total of 340 censuses.
In the second round, she waited for a man who was randomly checked at the elevator door of a building. After waiting for a long time, a man appeared. K took out the form and started recording. But perhaps because the questions were too many and too detailed, the man suddenly became impatient.
"Why are you investigating in such a detailed manner? What big data are you using to invade my privacy, are you coming to investigate me?" the man said.
He interrupted the investigation, walked home, and closed the door. Frightened by the man's sudden anger, K froze in place. She knew that the man was not targeting her. But in that moment, she became the vehicle for this anger.
Overtime Notice for December 2020
K has learned to be proficient at writing publicity press releases. Press releases are usually not long, about six or seven hundred words, and the point is to be accompanied by clear, varied, and beautiful pictures.
She has been working overtime almost all month. She filled out the overtime slip for the first time. There are overtime pay for overtime. The accumulated time is three hours and one overtime is 30 yuan. A full day of overtime is 80 yuan. After working overtime, you need to fill in an overtime application. Overtime pay is capped at 600 yuan per month. The cap means that it cannot reach 600 yuan, and the maximum is 580 yuan.
"Hitchhiking" January 2021
K received a daunting task. The street office issued an order saying that each community must publish no less than five reports per month in media at or above the municipal level. Once there are less than 5 articles, criticism will be notified and linked to the performance appraisal at the end of the year.
This is not an easy task. She will send an information release to many municipal and provincial news sites to see if the site's editors will adopt it. This information draft is only valid if it is accepted. There is also a simple way to sign a package contract with the website, but it requires money. K's leadership believes that this is an unnecessary expense, and K can only rely on himself. She began researching the tastes of editorial selections for the site, and generally speaking, events about seniors and minors were the easiest to pick up.
What K does most often is to take photos based on the activities of various line specialists. However, the amount of publicity that some lines need to complete is simply too heavy. The response of community workers is to "ride a ride".
For example, whenever some elderly people come to participate in activities organized by social workers, as long as the flags and banners are in place, they will take as many photos of the elderly as possible. This can act as both a volunteer activity and a civilization-creation activity as long as the context changes. The community will notify each other that if there is any event that is about to be prepared, the professionals who need a ride, prepare the materials and get on the bus.
Liked in February 2021
K's circle of friends began to appear some very different content from before. For example, "Happy City A, created by you and me! ""City A, it's so beautiful! ". Here's another job that propaganda does: posting comments online.
She will complete the task through a software, and transfer the news link that her superiors request to forward, comment or like to her circle of friends, and after forwarding, she needs to take a screenshot and report it up. The person in charge of the street often looks at the reports of each community in the group, for example, "So-and-so community should have completed 15 items, but only 5 items have been completed now."
K sometimes asks colleagues in other lines of the community to forward or leave a message. But sometimes the order is issued very late, such as ten o'clock in the evening. At this time, K can only rely on herself - she has registered three Weibo for this purpose. She usually deletes those Moments and Weibo after taking screenshots.
At one point, the link asking for comment was the upcoming news from a party. Other community workers responded longer, "Watch with me in front of the TV!" But she was very tired that day. She only left a message at the bottom: "Looking forward to it!"
After the Chinese New Year, she stayed on duty in the community and received a subsidy of 100 yuan, two buckets of instant noodles, and a box of Dove chocolates.
There is another task for Chinese New Year. She needs to teach her colleagues on duty to use the latest Internet public opinion system. They need to keep an eye on top local news online and what exactly people are talking about. Then report.
March 2021 Volunteer
She often needs to put on volunteer clothes to stand guard on the road from 7:30 to 8:00 in the morning, or from 4:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon. In fact, very few residents are really willing to be volunteers, and most of the time, community workers act as "volunteers".
K stands on the road, usually doing nothing and waving a flag. That is more of a symbolic meaning, just to tell everyone that there is a person standing here. Sometimes passers-by joked with her, asking if she would be punished if she was caught by the traffic police while riding an electric bike to run a red light.
She also needs to go on the road to inspect and supervise social publicity content, such as those public welfare posters, whether they are defaced, worn, faded, outdated, or out of date.
April 2021 Mass Reception
K received a very important task: she was to sit in front of the window and do the work of receiving the masses.
K believes that public reception is the most important thing a community worker should do. Whether it's distributing sticky rat boards, running social security, notifying property owners to repair lights in residential buildings, or replacing bumpy roads that affect the elderly, these are all real things. She likes to sit by the window and chat with people.
The problem is, it makes her even busier. The number of lines in her hand gradually increased to five, but the constant ringing of consultation calls and the people who kept coming to the door would always interrupt the tasks in her hand.
In community work, the reception of the masses is the most thankless task, and there is no special line responsible for this content. In other words, this is not strictly their main business. In the past, everyone used to take turns sitting at the window to receive the crowd, but since she took this seat, the others stopped answering the ringing phones. K said that she was so busy that she couldn't go to the toilet or drink water, and she never stopped.
But leaders say that as community workers, you must learn to work on multiple lines at the same time. A favorite metaphor of leaders is: "Learn to play the piano with both hands."
Vaccination in May 2021
The focus of this month's work is to organize a new crown vaccine. K thinks that people's mentality is very strange. The community started to promote the free vaccination here very early, but no one came here. When the news came out that the vaccine was not enough, everyone came to ask what to do if they wanted to get vaccinated.
K's community organized two intensive vaccinations. Every time at five o'clock in the morning, someone came to the gate of the community to line up. At eight o'clock, the community opened, and the staff of the health service center responsible for vaccination had not come to the door, and the queue had already lined up from the street to the end of the street. Maybe people are getting a little impatient. At this time, another colleague said, don't crowd in the queue, crowding is useless, you have to get the table to register first. In an instant, the one-kilometer-long team dissipated, and everyone was even more crowded, trying to rush into the community office. The leader asked K to hurry to the door to block it, and don't let the crowd rush in.
K to block the door. She put on a small bee megaphone and shouted: Don't squeeze, don't rub, the people from the hospital haven't come yet!
The crowd wasn't cooperating, K said, and people were going crazy.
Fill in the pit in June 2021
K went to a lot of conferences. Most of these meetings are organized by district-level governments and have no direct connection with K. K is just a "number of attendees".
Community workers refer to such participation as "filling the pit".
A certificate for July 2021
One day this month, K was on duty when a man walked in. He said the hospital asked him to come to the community to issue a certificate for reimbursement.
The proof is as follows:
"Accident certificate: I was accidentally bitten by a dog on the X month of the month, and I apply for a special certificate."
K has become accustomed to such strange proof requirements. The community does not have the right to enforce the law, nor does it assume any qualifications for certification. But there are always various units that require the community to issue proofs. For example, family relationship certificate, death certificate, residence certificate. K believes that this is some "responsibility" action taken by the agency. Asking the community to issue a certificate also requires the community to assume the role of audit. If the other party is brought to court in the future, the community also bears certain responsibilities.
Epidemic Prevention in August 2021
This month, K and his colleagues are focusing on epidemic prevention. What they have to do is not only to make phone calls, but as one of the "five packs and one" personnel, whenever they receive information from the district CDC about close contact, sub-close contact, inbound personnel, "space-time companions", and people passing through high-risk areas. , When notified by people who need centralized isolation or home isolation, if those people are in the grid of K, she needs to follow up the status of the "controlled objects" in real time: urge them to send nucleic acid reports at the required time and frequency, and buy food for the home isolation personnel, Bring the staff of the health service center to do nucleic acid testing for the relevant personnel, or watch the second-closest connection and the close-in connection get on the ambulance that is transferred to the centralized isolation.
"Five Guarantees and One" refers to the responsible personnel for certain control objects in the epidemic, namely street cadres, community cadres, public security officers, community medical workers, and grid personnel. Five persons are responsible for one person.
When a collective nucleic acid inspection is held, the health service center will also ask the community to send staff to be responsible for the verification of ID cards and the issuance of nucleic acid sample information stickers.
She also has to deal with reports from the same district. A grid corresponds to a length, and the length refers to the resident representatives (usually retired seniors) in the grid to assist in community work. When the epidemic occurs, the film director will keep an eye on the direction of the residents at any time. Before, a boss who opened a mahjong parlor in the K community traveled to medium and high-risk areas and posted a circle of friends. Later, it became a medium and high-risk area, and the boss secretly hid the circle of friends and continued to open a mahjong hall. At this time, a resident reported the boss to the film director, and the film director reported it to the grid staff. Of course, the mahjong parlor cannot be opened, and the boss is also quarantined at home.
Later, K was notified that community workers were required to participate in training in nucleic acid sampling and putting on and taking off protective clothing.
"Why does sampling have to let the community come now?" said another community member.
September-December 2021 Civilized City Creation Inspection
One of the busiest things about all the communities in City A is the Civilized City Creation Check. Checks arrive in waves, first at the district level, then at the municipal, provincial, and national levels.
First of all, to judge whether a city is civilized or not, it is to see how well the city's sanitation is doing. K's WeChat is on call 24 hours a day. She may be notified at any time to deal with "dynamic problems" in the grid: for example, when she is on the road, she supervises the store to tear up the advertisements of "big sale" and "store transfer". The store will not always cooperate, so it is necessary to check back and forth. . Another example is to enter the unit building to clean up psoriasis advertisements, and use paint to clean the seal. Another example is the "flying line" of the battery car extending from the window of the residential building, and the items accumulated in the corridor need to be cleaned up during the inspection. Hotels in the district are also a headache. There are always people throwing pornographic cards at the door of the hotel, sometimes a man on a motorcycle throws cards in front, and K picks it up behind.
All in all, make sure everyone is civilized during this time.
But the most important thing is "simulated household entry", especially when facing the national inspection. The national inspection team will select community samples in a city for inspection, and one of the links is to enter the residents' homes to conduct a questionnaire survey. K said that they must first enter the household in advance, so that the residents can answer all questions related to the creation of civilization "with confidence". If he encounters residents who are not so cooperative, K still needs to make a plan and do everything possible to prevent the inspectors from going to that building.
When the inspection team arrived in City A, their whereabouts had already been announced in the community staff group. The leader urged everyone to remember the face of the inspection team.
The sampling results come out, and there is no community where K is. Everyone in the office breathed a sigh of relief.
4
Before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, my life rarely intersected with community workers, let alone the existence of grid workers. In my hometown (a provincial capital city in the south), my only remaining impression of the community seems to be a "volunteer certificate" that requires a community holiday when going to school. Later, a community horn was hung on the street of our house. The horn will sound on time every day, broadcasting some announcements back and forth, such as: "The recruitment of college students is in progress", or, "Everyone is responsible for drug control, and there are rewards for reporting drug addicts, up to 200,000 yuan."
But after the pandemic, "community" or "community workers" suddenly entered each of our lives in an unexpected way. In Beijing, I received many calls from the community where I lived. At first you will think this strange call is a sales pitch, but gradually you will become familiar with the phone number, and finally, you will not dare to refuse any strange call.
The first time I received a call from them was in the summer of 2020. At that time, when I passed through Shanghai, a street in Pudong became a medium-risk area. Although I did not pass through Pudong, my health code suddenly changed after returning to Beijing. Huang, so I followed the pop-up prompt from Beijing Healthbao and went to my community to report the situation.
I looked up the address of the neighborhood online and walked into a neighborhood committee hidden in an old-fashioned neighborhood (I had never been here before). It is on the first floor of a building with a fruit shop and a dry cleaner next to it, and a billboard at the door distinguishes it from other buildings. Walking in is a reception room of twenty or thirty square meters. There are about three or four community workers in the office, all of them girls, all young. There are four computers on the table, piled with thick materials. One of the girls received me. I indicated the situation, presented the nucleic acid report, and filled out a letter of commitment that I did not pass through medium and high-risk areas. The girl said, I may have been accidentally caught by big data. She logged my information into the computer system. I asked, how long will it take for my healthy baby to return to normal? The girl shrugged, "Maybe a day or two." All they could do was to wait for the system to remove me from the big data list.
The second time, I passed through a city with medium-risk streets. After returning to Beijing, my health treasure did not turn yellow, but I still received calls from the community. On the phone, the staff member asked me to participate in the collective nucleic acid immediately. I explained that I didn't pass through the medium risk area, just arrived at the city. My explanation obviously didn't work, and the staff also rejected my request to find a hospital for nucleic acid testing.
"Is the collective nucleic acid a nasal swab or a throat swab?"
"You can go to the scene and discuss with the medical staff," she said.
Only nasal swabs are allowed on site. I was a little helpless, and when I got a call from the community asking about vaccinations, I inevitably lost some enthusiasm. To be honest, I'm kind of annoyed. It wasn't until after I had a few chats with Mr. K that I tried to look at these experiences from a different perspective -- also from the perspective of nearly 4 million community workers in China.
The current community system in China originated from the founding of New China. In October 1949, the "Shangyangshi Street Residents Committee" was established in Shangyangshi Street, Hangzhou. This is China's first residents committee, and it symbolizes the end of the long-standing "baojia" system in Chinese history. By 1986, the Ministry of Civil Affairs first introduced the concept of community into urban management. During the epidemic, community workers constituted a prevention and control system that China had never had before.
This prevention and control system is also based on grid management. In an article published on China Sociology Network in 2013, it said that the grid management of communities was first practiced in urban management in Dongcheng District, Beijing in 2004, and then in Chaoyang District, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu, etc. City (district) pilot. In 2013, various parts of China began to implement social governance grid work, that is, to divide grids in a community, and each grid is linked to a community worker. Further implementation in 2019. The goal that grid governance is trying to achieve is: small things do not exist in the grid, and big things do not exist in the community.
But this idea was not fully implemented until the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020. Simultaneously, the fact that community workers take on increasingly onerous tasks and responsibilities.
A colleague of K has been in the community for fifteen years. Of course, the job has some benefits, she said, such as being close to home and relatively easy day-to-day even if the pay isn't high. But since the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, the community has suddenly received a lot of attention. And according to the principle of "territorial management" (whose site is responsible), all administrative agencies have begun to delegate their work to the community, and the community's tasks have become heavier and heavier. Even her, an old community worker, often complains. She took the creation of a civilized city as an example: "Going to the streets as a volunteer and picking up garbage should belong to sanitation and urban management. You say, what does this have to do with us?"
In such a situation, the community began to recruit a large number of young people. This also overturned the impression I once thought that the members of the neighborhood committee were all middle-aged and elderly women. Almost all of these young people have gone through public recruitment or signed labor contracts directly with community grid management sub-centers.
When I searched for community workers on social networks, a post on Zhihu asked: "What about the profession of community workers?"
Most responded by persuading young people to never work in the community. A social worker mentioned the embarrassing positioning of the community in the administrative management system: when working, it is under the jurisdiction of the neighborhood office, but when giving benefits, it says that it does not belong to the neighborhood office. Another community worker in Tianjin said that the epidemic can show the importance of community work, but no one recognizes your work, there is no future for development, and the salary is lower than the average salary in Tianjin.
Many others will emphasize the high pressure and intensity of community workers. For example, a 22-year-old Zhengzhou community worker said that when the epidemic broke out in Zhengzhou, she participated in the organization of collective nucleic acid, and did not go home for several days, and when she returned home, her body stinks. She left after eight months in the community. Another person said that during the epidemic situation in Shenyang, she made frequent calls, and the more she called, the more she collapsed. A community worker who worked in Hangzhou for five years said that he was most tired of the job of commenting on the Internet. He later quit his job to study programming. He believed that the world is not beautiful at all, full of lies, and only computers are real.
However, there is also an answer that reads: "This depends on your mentality. I am for everyone, and everyone is for me."
Another friend of mine commented that community workers are like "officials" in contemporary China. This is very different from "community" in the sociological sense. The positioning of the Chinese community is more like the community of the country, and it is the grass-roots carrier for the state to deliver public services to the citizens. In an interview with the media, Wang Defu, an associate professor at the School of Sociology of Wuhan University, said that when urban management requires fine details like embroidery, especially in residential areas, the community assumes more and more functions, but its governance resources are still limited. state, so it's hard to adapt.
And it is a large number of young people like K who maintain this governance system. Sometimes I feel like they're sort of like batteries, fully charging the system and leaving exhausted.
5
When I arrived in City A, K was busy with the establishment of a civilized city. We can only meet at a McDonald's after she gets off work, usually ten at night. She came over in a battery car with an army green windshield covering the front of the car, which was her work vehicle. Compared to the last time we met, K is a little fatter. She is not tall, wears a light-colored down jacket, has a ponytail, and has heavy dark circles under her eyes. We sat down at a table. K orders an onion shaker and turns on his phone.
We met five times in total, and spent more than ten hours reading her work notes and 17,000 work-related photos on her phone. Her work is busier than I thought. When it came to the last two months, K lost patience.
She kept sighing. "Alas, this is to fill a hole."
Then she sighed again. "Alas, this is writing material."
After working in the community for a year, her weight quickly rebounded back to when she worked for variety shows, even far beyond that time. Her physique is prone to obesity. If she wants to maintain a normal figure, she must have a normal routine, restrain her diet and exercise a lot. But she struggled to do that when working in the community. Now, she's used to hiding her fat in a thick padded jacket.
It's hard to imagine what real "obesity" actually means, K said. As she walked back and forth in the grid, her inner thighs were often scuffed by the pants, even though she was already wearing her largest size.
For K, however, the most troubling problem right now is that she doesn't know what the job is about. At first, she went to the "post" - now, that "post" seems to be impossible to wait for. When he first joined the community and signed the work contract, K listened to the leader and his colleagues predicting that the district would definitely hold community recruitment this year. According to the wind, there should be 2 places. At that time, community temporary workers across the district will be competing for both spots.
It sounds like this is a somewhat difficult exam. K wasn't worried then. Her original idea was to get a post first, to become a junior leader after five years in the community, and then to join the two committees of the community for five years, and then she would be able to have a qualification to take the examination for a targeted civil servant.
Then, she has a weave.
"What about after getting into programming?" I asked her.
"Then I didn't think about it." She took a sip of ice water. Perhaps, for K, "weaving" is more of a symbolic meaning, as if weaving itself is enough to be the end of an imaginary life.
But a year later, she didn't even see the shadow of the "post" exam. "Posts" are not timed like civil servants and career exams, but are more often selected by district-level governments according to their needs. She felt that this goal was becoming less and less impossible. As a temporary worker, she has neither enough money (she recently owed some money on her credit card), no evaluation criteria (meaning that all the jobs arranged by the leadership are her tasks), and she has no future. I think she is sometimes busier than the employees of Internet companies in big cities who work according to the "996" system, but she doesn't know why she is so busy. At times, K was really annoyed by the busyness and anxiety of the job. She vaguely felt that something was wrong with her state. She went to a psychiatrist who showed moderate depression and anxiety.
We looked out the window, it was very late at night and it was hard to see cars on the street. At this time, we suddenly saw three volunteers in red vests, two boys and one girl. They are all young. The winter in City A is very cold. They were talking and walking down the street with the garbage folder, and the white mist exhaled from their mouths.
"Look! It's another community worker who works overtime for the sake of civilization." K said.
According to my observation, what makes this governance system work may be one quality—obedience and execution. This year K has been in the community, no matter what tasks she receives that seem completely incomprehensible, she will definitely execute and complete them. She doesn't think deeply about the meaning behind these tasks, or the connection between these tasks and herself.
There is a bridge outside the window. K mentioned that the sky bridge was right in the middle of the jurisdiction of the two communities. One day, a homeless man came on the overpass. The staff of the first community rushed over after hearing the news. He asked the homeless man to move his position to the end of the overpass. The end of the bridge is the second community. Jurisdiction. Immediately afterwards, the staff of the second community also came, and he asked the homeless man to move back to his original position.
In the end, the tramp couldn't stand the interruption from both sides and left the overpass.
The restaurant will be closing soon. I asked K, if she was really going to quit this job, what would she want to do after that?
She hesitated again.
K has just arrived in this community for the fourth month (she was not that busy at that time), and one day she came home from overtime, she saw the variety show "Drama New Life", one of the passages was seen by several drama actors at the recording location On a piano, I took turns sitting on it and played it casually as if I was doing it at home. She watched this clip many times over and over. Two days later, she also went to sign up for a piano training class, 30 lessons to be completed within two years. She went to a few classes and began to be able to play some simple passages. But later, with more and more overtime, her piano lessons became idle.
K said she was envious of these people. In that variety show segment, those people seemed to have something that she loved from the bottom of her heart, and she didn't know what she loved. What should the pivot of a young man's life consist of? consumption and entertainment? money? Still work?
Sometimes she asks friends around her. The same question, friends do not know how to answer. Many people follow the arrangements at home. K's parents are already satisfied that their daughter can work in the community. Hearing that K wanted to resign, her parents quarreled with her several times.
What is the answer? K is still confused. "Maybe, when I resign, I will still take the civil service exam," she said.
Original content link: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/676880.html#
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