Analysis: The Controversial Role of Residential Committees in China’s Covid Enforcement

In the past three years of China’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, one grassroots organization has played a central role in assisting the government with implementing numerous disease control measures, including sealing off communities and confining residents, at neighborhoods across the country: the so-called “residential committees (居民委员会).”

While residential committees also carry out mass testing and organize patient transfers within communities, multiple legal professionals told Caixin that the enforcement measures constitute a violation of the law as these groups do so without legal and public authorization.