Community Participation, Sense of Community and Social Capital: China's Experience

Background and Purpose.

In the last two decades, community-based services have increasingly been accepted in China. As community-based services give ordinary Chinese opportunities participate in their communities, China's community participation is promisingly moving from one extreme (participation as involvement in service programs) to the other (participation for community decision-making). According to Western theories, this trend could be facilitated by the increased sense of community and social capital. However, the historical lack of sense of community and unique characteristics of social capital in China present uncertainties of these relationships. It is unclear how community participation, sense of community and social capital interact with each other in the context of Chinese culture and China's society. Few empirical studies using national dataset in China have ever been conducted; comparisons between rural and urban community participation are nonexistence.

Methods.

This study used dataset of China General Social Survey 2005, which is a national randomly sampled survey, including 10,372 people in both rural and urban China. This study examines: (1) Does the sense of community associate with community participation? (2) Does individual's social capital contribute to community participation? (3) Are urban and rural people different in their patterns of community participation? Factor analysis is used to examine the underlying dimensions of social capital (3 sub-scales: membership, reciprocity, and trust) and sense of community (2 sub-scales: neighboring and neighborhood mutuality). Community participation is measured by a yes-no question asking whether or not the respondent voted last time selecting the members of community decision-making body. Logistic regressions are developed to test the hypothesis.

Results.

Rural residents have a significant higher level of sense of community (neighboring and mutuality), a lower level of social capital (membership and reciprocity), and a higher level of trust. Controlling for demographic variables, regression results indicate that sense of community significantly predicted community participation. However, odds ratios for the two measures are fairly small (1.234 and 1.118 for neighboring and neighborhood mutuality, respectively), suggesting little change in the likelihood of community participation. Among the three dimensions of social capital, only reciprocity within the network significantly predicted community participation. Urban and rural people significantly differ from each other; rural people are 5.67 times more likely to participate in their communities than urban residents. While none of the social capital measures could predict community participation for people in rural area, reciprocity shows its significance in predicting urban people's community participation.

Conclusions and Implications.

Experience from China suggests different understanding of the relationships among community participation, social capital and sense of community. Unlike western studies, the concept of social capital derived from theories about networking, bonding or bridging has failed to explain community participation in China. Rather, personal knowing and helping nurture one's sense of community and motivate people to participate. This is because social capital is primarily conceptualized as an individual characteristic, which is not embedded collectively in a community setting. Community practice in China must therefore pay additional attention to the dynamic interaction between individual and community in order to facilitate participation.