China’s people-centered approach to urban development is shifting its emphasis from spatial expansion to the effectiveness of governance. The success of this transition depends on whether primary-level governance can leverage institutional innovation to translate a people-centered philosophy into practical results that accurately address people’s needs.

Jiangyin in east China’s Jiangsu Province offers a compelling example of how this can be done at the primary level. As a county-level city in the Yangtze River Delta, Jiangyin has a dual character: It retains the acquaintance networks characteristic of traditional rural society while confronting the challenges common to modern cities, including increasingly diverse public needs and fragmented coordination among administrative departments amid rapid urbanization. This hybrid urban-rural character makes Jiangyin’s experience relevant not only to other county-level jurisdictions but also to urban governance more broadly. Its approach—responding to people’s needs through institutional innovation—does not depend on special policy advantages. Instead, it concentrates on reshaping lines of accountability, integrating technology into governance, and coordinating institutions—fundamental issues that every city must address as it modernizes its governance.

From space renewal to governance innovation: Communities are the basic units of urban governance. Urban renewal may determine whether adequate physical space is available, but whether a city is genuinely good ultimately depends on such practical matters as whether a clogged septic tank is promptly cleared, a broken hallway light gets fixed, and a government department is willing to take the lead in addressing parking shortages.

The structural solution to these problems lies in embedding the political leadership and resource-coordination roles of Party organizations throughout the governance process and building an integrated framework that spans organizational boundaries and mobilizes multiple stakeholders.

Deploying officials to the community level: In Jiangyin, this organizational framework is built around Party branches in residential communities. All 709 of the city’s residential communities have established community-level Party branches, bringing together homeowners’ committees, property management companies, and government personnel assigned to the primary level on a single platform.

To curb buck-passing in the handling of service orders from the 12345 hotline, Jiangyin introduced a first-recipient responsibility system. The first department to receive an order must take the lead in coordinating its resolution, closing a loophole that previously allowed orders simply to be “returned.”

Complex complaints that cross jurisdictional boundaries are managed through a four-tier coordination system, ensuring their systematic escalation to officials with the authority to resolve them. The “whistle-blowing and response” mechanism has proved effective in breaking down fragmented administration: Villages and residential communities “blow the whistle” to subdistrict offices, subdistrict offices “blow the whistle” to municipal departments, and the relevant departments respond immediately.

At its core, this mechanism mobilizes government agencies around people’s needs, replaces slow, hierarchical chains of command with a more direct response, and shifts the focus from departmental jurisdictions to the problem itself, providing reliable organizational safeguards for addressing public concerns.

Using digital tools to improve efficiency: Jiangyin has established an integrated command platform that brings together public requests and reports from multiple channels, including 12345 hotline data, grid-based governance reports, and non-emergency calls to the 110 police hotline. It supports a three-tier coordinated command structure spanning the municipal, township, and village levels. After the platform was piloted, response times fell from three to five days to less than 24 hours, with more than 95% of issues resolved at the village or community level.

For a digital platform to function effectively, it must be backed by cross-departmental coordination. Jiangyin has introduced a “three-lists-and-one-letter” supervision system, using written requirements and firm deadlines to ensure that directives issued through the platform are received and acted upon.

The city has also incorporated AI into the system. Its smart service-order dispatch tool uses a proprietary large language model trained on more than 100,000 historical service orders, achieving nearly 98% dispatch accuracy and reducing average processing time to 30 seconds per order. A public sentiment analysis and assessment platform has aggregated approximately 5 million event records, helping government departments “act before complaints are filed.”

Together, these digital tools have driven three major changes. A unified data network now captures public sentiment, shifting decision-making from experience-based judgments to data-driven analysis; a unified response network provides closed-loop case handling, reducing buck-passing and interagency friction; and a unified evaluation network assesses performance, providing an evidence-based foundation for accountability and evaluation.

Lu Huilin is a professor from the Department of Sociology at Peking University.