Unit Community-Review Thought·and Enlightment

After the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the socialist state ownership was put into practice. Since then, the cities in China have developed in an unique way by entering into the so-called unit community stage lasting nearly 50 years, and communities in cities take the form of unit communities. The existence of unit communities lies on the presence of units system, so the research on unit communities should be based on the study on units system. Generally speaking, there are three major reasons contributing to the presence of unit communities in China: First of all, historically, the Communist Party established its branches based on a military regiment-company, which largely enhanced the Party's power to lead military troops; secondly, from the perspective of economic system, with the implementation of the socialist state ownership, all properties belonged to the state or collectivity, and the people, as the real proletarians, became memebers of the country or units, therefore, it should be said that the socialist state ownership ensures the existence of unit communities; the third reason lies in the need of the expansion and conformity of social resources: given the backward and seriously damaged economy, for the sake of controling state finance and suppressing speculation, the country adopted the policy of confiscation and redeemability to all kinds of economic entities, hence the expansion of national economic strength, and the end of multi-sector economy. In this way, the highly-homogenous unit system has since been taken its form.At the early stage of the foundation of new China, unit communities had ever been expanded with the same speed as general communities. Hereafter, with the further development of unit system, communities were further evolved into unit communities, and units were socialized to a greater extent, until, in 1960s-70s, unit communities reached the period of maturity, when city communities completely evolved into unit communities. After the Culture Revolution, in order to shake off poverty, China practised the policy of reform and opening to the outside world, and economic system was transformed from planned economy to market economy, during which some state-owned large and medium-sized enterprises had undergone the transformation of economic system, and some went bankrupt, which resulted in the disintegration of some unit communities. On the other hand, the non-public sectors of the economy gained the chance to have a great development, in this way, some city communities went back to...