The CCP’s Takeover of ‘Society Work’ in China

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Sep 10, 2025 - 09:54 Updated: Sep 10, 2025 - 09:46
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The CCP’s Takeover of ‘Society Work’ in China

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Commentary

A relatively new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agency called the Central Society Work Department (CSWD) is getting increased attention.

The CSWD was instituted in 2023, apparently in response to local protests in China over COVID-19 lockdowns and the country’s economic slowdown. The CCP ostensibly meant the CSWD “to modernize the country’s social governance and better handle complaints and proposals from the public.” It was also supposed to better solicit the opinions of the public, including those of individual petitioners.

However, independent analysts and this newspaper quickly identified the CSWD’s primary goal as being the acquisition of greater CCP control over Chinese civil society through individual-level surveillance, payoffs, and crackdowns. Only if need be, societal reform could be made to appear as having been initiated by the CCP rather than due to the complaints of individuals.

While in the past individual Chinese could petition against corrupt officials, now the CSWD would lump them in with the near-criminal, mentally ill, financial failures, and other “troubled” individuals. They would be treated as dangers to society, surveilled, criminalized, or provided with just enough extra social services to keep them quiet.

Recent scholarship and reporting are starting to catch on, underlining that the CSWD is, in fact, a way to centralize control over a broad array of relatively autonomous Chinese individuals and local community solutions to their problems by ensuring that these solutions do not threaten political stability, and comply with CCP discipline and Party building. This includes the forced incorporation into the CSWD of local “social organizations, private enterprises, letters and visits bureaus, volunteer workers, and grassroots government” associations.
Targeted individuals include not only those with “problems” but also those relatively independent of employment hierarchies in China through their individual employment as online influencers, gig economy workers, or tech workers. The CCP sees these individuals as a threat because they lack a boss who is answerable to the Party.

The persons under the surveillance of the CSWD are considered “five-loss individuals” because they supposedly fit into five undesirable categories. They have financial or family problems, mental or emotional disorders, or other life setbacks. A person who petitions the government for change can easily be punished by listing him as a five-loss individual, which presumes that his desire for change outside of the CCP structure is a form of mental or other individual disorder.

The CSWD does provide some benefits to listed five-loss individuals, including occasional debt forgiveness, counseling, or even help with home repairs. However, getting listed is not worth it because it includes extra surveillance and possible criminalization of the individual.

Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of China, has directly equated “good” social work with the long-term ability of the CCP to control China. The CSWD’s combination of surveillance and services is meant to mitigate perceived risks to the social order from troubled persons, including from societal or political instability that might percolate from the individual to the village level, or from the village level to that of a province or the regime in Beijing.

Most notable in causing the new emphasis on social work was the instability that arose from COVID-19 lockdowns, including rare public protests with individuals raising blank sheets of paper, and some calling for regime change. The CSWD is specifically geared to making this and other social movements, including labor strikes and mass petitions against local officials, easier to identify in their infancy, and so easier to quell through inexpensive individual-level solutions, crackdowns, or policy reform.

The policy reform would appear as if it were initiated by the CCP rather than in response to protests. More recently, mass attacks, such as vehicles driven at high speed into crowds, have been frequent enough in China to have become a major topic on Chinese social media. The CCP characterizes five-loss individuals to be more likely to conduct such attacks, which provides the Party with the self-justification necessary to increase surveillance on them rather than provide long-term reform.

By identifying the cause of the problems at the individual level, the CCP is attempting to divorce itself from any responsibility for the societal-level problems it creates. People more often have financial problems in China, relative to places such as Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, because they are, on average, poorer in China compared to their near-peers in East Asia. This is due to the CCP’s misguided economic policies, including an aggressive militarism that wastes taxpayer money. The resulting financial trouble of individuals across China tends to accentuate the individual’s family and emotional disturbances.

Also insufficiently addressed is that the CSWD is another step by the CCP, and communists generally, to attempt to replace the social safety net of religious and other community organizations with the CCP’s own failed attempts to address individual-level problems. This further concentrates power in the CCP and removes it from local-level solutions provided by organizations with which the CCP sees itself in competition.

Religion has always been a glue that holds society together. As communists dissolve that glue, they are forced to put something in its place or accept greater political instability. The latter is obviously unacceptable to the CCP, so greater state control and surveillance through crackdowns and ostensible social services at the individual level is its strategy. However, this only serves to decrease social feedback to the CCP, which makes the real reforms necessary for improving China more difficult to achieve.

Given greater spontaneous support for civil society rather than communist “solutions,” the CCP’s attempts to take over the realm of social work are bound to lead to a yet more rigid form of government, and greater public disappointment in the CCP.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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