关键词: 服务激活社会, 五社联动, 社会建设, 城市治理, 运行模式

Abstract:

For many years, research on social construction was divided between the academic theories of state centrism and social centrism. These theories reveal the research results of social construction and the logic of power production in China’s past. But they cannot provide a new direction for social construction in the new era, which takes party leadership as the core and the people as the center. This is represented by the development path of the four communities in Suzhou’s Taicang City. As this study shows, under the guidance of the community party organization, those communities were introduced to social organizations through the government’s procurement of public service projects in which professional social workers, charitable resources, and other diverse elements, were used to create volunteer teams. The result was achieving the “same goal by different routes”. Put another way, the party and the government introduced service projects to society and thereby realized the goal of multi subject interactions that activated social vitality and internal order. Different from the social construction logic characterized by restrictions and cooperation from the perspective of state-centrism, the service-activated social model emphasizes that the party and the government should always respect the laws of social operations. This can be done comprehensively through methods such as the transfer of public service functions, the cultivation of social organizations, the restriction of the rule of law, and incentivizing values so as to activate social vitality on an orderly basis. In the end, these efforts have led to the formation of a new era of co-construction, co-governance, and sharing. The slogan—Service Activates Society—reveals the operational mode of social construction driven by the coordination of five social forces. It provides a new way of thinking about the intertwined social construction pattern of the party, government, society, and other subjects.

Key words: service activates society, the coordination of of five social forces, social construction, urban governance, underlying logic