Deliberative democracy, an important development in late-twentieth-century Western political theory, holds that legitimate decision-making must originate from consensus reached by free and equal citizens through public deliberation, emphasizing rational discussion, reciprocity, and orientation toward the public interest rather than simple voting and interest aggregation [1]. Its philosophical foundation can be traced back to Habermas’s theory of communicative action [2]. Chinese scholarship on deliberative democracy with Chinese characteristics has developed along four strands: (1) historical and cultural genealogy, which traces its ideals to traditions such as “the world belonging to all” and “harmony in diversity”, as well as to the CPC’s “united front” and “mass line” methods [3]; (2) institutional and procedural construction, which examines the CPPCC as a specialized consultative body and the design of grassroots deliberative procedures to ensure substantive rather than formalistic deliberation [4]-[7]; (3) governance effectiveness, which analyzes how deliberative democracy resolves social conflicts, facilitates policy implementation, and builds community governance communities in pursuit of “good governance” [8][9]; and (4) technology empowerment, which explores how digital platforms expand participation and improve transparency while attending to challenges such as the digital divide.

In China, deliberative democracy has become an important component of socialist democratic politics and a key form of whole-process people’s democracy, with successive CPC National Congress reports providing its political legitimacy and strategic direction. The report to the 18th Congress (2012) first incorporated deliberative democracy into the Party’s national agenda, calling for its “broad, multilevel, and institutionalized development”. The report to the 19th Congress (2017) defined it as “a unique form and distinctive strength of China’s socialist democracy” and specified seven consultative channels covering all levels of state governance. The report to the 20th Congress (2022) further situated it within whole-process people’s democracy, emphasizing institutionalization, standardization, and proceduralization. Research on how deliberative democracy affects policy implementation in contemporary China must therefore be positioned within this framework and closely integrated with grassroots practice. Grounded in the case of Community G in City J, this study investigates how deliberative democracy converts institutional strengths into governance effectiveness in the field of youth care. Methodologically, the study adopts a single-case design, drawing on the authors’ field investigation, the community’s internal working documents and statistical records (principally for 2022 - 2023), as well as publicly available policy texts and prior scholarship. For this study, policy implementation effectiveness is defined as the degree to which youth-care policies accurately respond to differentiated adolescent needs, achieve equitable service access, gain stakeholder recognition, reduce administrative operation costs, and avoid idle public resources. Five measurable dimensions are operationalized as follows (see Table 1).

Table 1. Implementation effectiveness operational indicators.

Source: Compiled by the author.

1.2.1. Implementation Dilemmas of Youth-Care Policies

Young people’s growth involves diverse and individualized needs, and the traditional top-down implementation model exhibits objective difficulties; yet existing research has paid insufficient attention to how deliberative democracy can improve the implementation effectiveness of youth-care services, which combine a public character with strong demands for precision. Drawing on policy documents, official reports, and prior studies, six categories of implementation dilemmas can be identified.

First, policy instruments are structurally imbalanced: some policies are vaguely worded and lack detailed operating rules, resources, and assessment standards, generating “tensions” and “policy blockages” between formulation and enforcement [10]. Second, fiscal and human resources are insufficient: professional capacity is weak and coverage is low—for example, the “Tree-Hole Pocket” mental-health project in Bishan District, Chongqing, receives large volumes of student letters weekly but has only three full-time staff, making effective follow-up of complex cases difficult [11]. Third, supply and demand are mismatched: idle resources coexist with scarcity, as illustrated by the low attendance (about 65 percent) in Hong Kong’s Student Health Service Scheme, while monolithic service models—such as purely restrictive “teen modes” on online platforms—fail to meet diverse needs [12]. Fourth, cross-departmental coordination is weak: youth-care work involves numerous departments whose actions are poorly coordinated and mostly fall to schools, while information silos impede referral, follow-up, and closed-loop case management [13]. Fifth, implementation deviates toward formalism: even well-designed policies weaken at the “last mile”, with some projects remaining at the level of formalistic activities and failing to address young people’s real needs [14]. Sixth, evaluation and supervision mechanisms are absent: most projects lack scientific effectiveness indicators and tracking systems, leaving the outcomes of interventions unmeasured and the care chain incomplete. Table 2 summarizes this typology.

Table 2. Typology of implementation dilemmas of youth-care policies.

Source: Compiled by the author.

These dilemmas arise from complex interactions across policy design, resource allocation, interdepartmental coordination, implementation, and supervision-evaluation. Reducing “policy blockages” requires improving the completeness and operability of policy content, enhancing implementers’ capacity, correcting the target group’s cognitive deviations, and optimizing the policy environment—tasks for which deliberative democracy offers a promising institutional instrument.

1.2.2. The Typicality and Representativeness of Community G

Community G is located at the seat of the City J CPC Committee and municipal government, covering 1.22 square kilometers with 22 residential compounds, 4,197 households, and 10,591 residents. Its demographic structure is marked by a pronounced “one old, one young” profile—11 percent elderly and 10 percent children and adolescents—providing a natural basis for elder-youth interaction. Using the “Red-Collar e-Home: Silver-Age Companionship for Growth” brand as its vehicle, the community has built a youth-service model featuring deep participation of the “Five Elders” (veteran cadres, soldiers, experts, teachers, and role models) under Party-building leadership, with notable results. The community embodies the orientation of “Party-building leadership, pluralistic co-governance, and precise services” that characterizes contemporary Chinese community governance: its Party committee coordinates a structure of “branch linkage, Five Elders’ engagement, and social collaboration”; fifty-six “Five Elders” members (85 percent Party members) have been recruited into a “Silver-Age Lecturing Team”; a “three-color alert” care mechanism and programs such as public-welfare classrooms and intangible cultural heritage workshops deliver precise services; resources of schools, hospitals, enterprises, and social organizations are integrated; and the “Red-Collar e-Home” smart platform supports digitally empowered governance. Its experience is thus typical and representative, offering a reference for comparable communities—though as a reference in working ideas and methods rather than a replicable template, since every community must adapt to its own resource endowments, demographic structure, and salient problems.

1.3.1. Fieldwork Schedule

Author conducted continuous field investigation in Community G from March 2023 to January 2024, covering pre-investigation, formal semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, and secondary document sorting. Supplementary follow-up visits were carried out in April 2025 to update 2024 service operation data and verify long-term intervention outcomes.

Purposive stratified sampling was adopted, with four participant groups (total N = 76): Community governance staff (12): Party secretary, deputy secretary, CCNG full-time staff, grid workers; selected based on their overall coordination of youth care programs. Five Elders backbone members (24): recruited from the Silver-Age Lecturing Team, including retired cadres, teachers, veterans; prioritized those with paired youth assistance experience over 1 year. Youth & family representatives (32): 17 adolescents under red alert, 7 tracked yellow-risk teenagers, 8 general student parents; stratified by family type (single-parent, low-income, dual-worker migrant families). External collaborative stakeholders (8): enterprise CCNG managers, primary school counselors, civil affairs street officers; selected for cross-department coordination interviews.

1.3.2. Interview & Observation Arrangement

Semi-structured interviews: 76 one-on-one interviews (30 - 60 minutes each), recorded with informed consent; interview themes covered demand identification, deliberation procedure, resource matching, service dilemmas. Participatory observation: 28 on-site observations of offline deliberation meetings, 4:30 classroom, intangible cultural heritage workshops, intergenerational storytelling events; the author participated as a volunteer observer without intervening routine work. Supplementary focus groups: 2 special consultation group meetings with Five Elders and parent representatives to cross-check inconsistent interview statements.

Three-layer verification was applied to internal working documents (2022 - 2023 archives): Cross-validation: Match statistical records (service hours, participant counts, alert case logs) with interview narratives from staff and Five Elders; Source tracing: Original paper archives (meeting minutes, demand collection forms, resource cooperation agreements) were checked against digital platform back-end data of Red-Collar e-Home; Triangulation: Discrepant data points were resolved via follow-up telephone visits with community administrators to revise and standardize statistical entries before analysis.

Centered on the work of caring for the next generation, Community G has constructed a deliberative co-governance structure in which the community Party committee serves as the core, the Committee for the Care of the Next Generation (CCNG) functions as the executive hub, the “Five Elders” constitute the backbone, and multiple actors participate jointly [15][16]. Organizationally, the CCNG is directed by the Party committee secretary, with the deputy Party secretary and “Five Elders” backbone members as deputy directors, and four functional groups—ideological education, conflict mediation, cultural inheritance, and care and assistance—enable professionalized responses to youth needs, embodying the principle of “Party building driving CCNG building”. Mechanistically, the community has formed a working mechanism of “Party-committee leadership, branch responsibility for designated areas, Five Elders taking the lead, and pluralistic co-governance”, which integrates governance resources inside and outside the administrative system. In terms of platforms, the offline “Five Elders Workstation” and the “Red-Collar e-Home: Reading for the Future” space co-built with an enterprise CCNG, together with online venues such as the “Silver-Age Livestreaming Room”, provide multidimensional channels for deliberative participation. A typical case illustrates this structure’s efficacy: upon discovering through door-to-door surveys that a child with cleft lip and palate could not afford timely surgery, the Party committee secretary coordinated with the district health commission and civil affairs bureau to secure a free surgical quota under existing policy—demonstrating the Party organization’s pivotal role as a resource linker and conflict coordinator.

Community G has formed a service-supply model of precise “needs-resources” matching. Its needs-identification system, built on the “Five Elders Lighthouse” project and the “1234 Seedling-Cultivation” mechanism, has realized the transition from “the government deciding the menu” to “residents placing orders” through the “menu-ordering service” model. On this basis, a “three-color alert” care mechanism implements dynamic risk grading and precise intervention: red pairing (one-to-one assistance between “Five Elders” members and seventeen children from single-parent families and other priority groups), yellow tracking (monthly psychological counseling for seven children in difficulty), and blue emergency response (immediate relief for twenty-three households with special difficulties). Resource integration proceeds along two coordinated paths. Endogenously, the political prestige, social capital, and professional expertise of the “Five Elders” are activated: veteran Party member Zhao Jinhu, for example, not only helped the child with cleft lip and palate secure medical resources but also reshaped the child’s growth environment through long-term paired assistance. Exogenously, a community-enterprise linkage established the Xinhua Reading enterprise CCNG and created the “Red-Collar e-Home: Reading for the Future” space, effectively resolving after-school care difficulties for children of workers in new forms of employment. Spatially, the community has transformed dispersed venues—the Party-masses service center, the New Era Civilization Practice Station, and the Youth Home—into a functionally composite “full-chain service space”, embedding the “4:30 Classroom,” an intangible cultural heritage workshop, and parent-child reading programs to achieve economies of scale and scope in service supply.

Although it has not explicitly adopted a standardized procedure such as the “six-step method”, Community G’s practice embodies the closed-loop logic of deliberative democracy through an effective set of implicit operational norms: needs are surveyed through visits, online solicitation, and grid-worker feedback (217 valid needs identified in 2023, 68 percent concerning youth services); agendas are formulated through CCNG screening and special investigations; multi-party deliberation proceeds through quarterly joint conferences and twelve special consultative meetings annually, producing solutions such as the “one policy for each person” assistance plan for children in difficulty; a mechanism matching “resource lists” with “needs lists” matched fifty-three projects and linked social resources worth approximately RMB 150,000 in 2023; and outcome feedback is secured through a points-based incentive system (1,200 service hours redeemed in 2023) and satisfaction evaluations (92 percent satisfaction). Table 3 summarizes the complete deliberative decision-making process and corresponding 2023 output indicators.

Table 3.The deliberative decision-making process and its outcomes in community G.

Source: Compiled by the author.

The community has also innovated pluralistic deliberative forms adapted to different groups: online-offline integration (twelve sessions of “cloud-based Party lectures” attracting 3,500 person-times of views, plus “walking ideological-political classes” visiting revolutionary memorial halls and the satellite launch center); intergenerational deliberation (eight sessions of “Listening to Grandpa Tell Stories of the Past”, pairing thirty-two “Five Elders” members with 105 young people); a “four seasons” themed-activity matrix (with annual youth participation exceeding 1,200 person-times); and scenario-embedded deliberation (the children’s library serving simultaneously as couriers’ rest station, grandparents’ reading-guidance venue, and students’ homework space, with annual service volume exceeding 1,920 person-times). These standardized procedures have yielded substantive effectiveness: the “menu-ordering service” has responded to eighty-nine individualized needs with 100 percent satisfaction; the “three-color alert” mechanism has intervened in seventeen high-risk cases, managed thirty-eight transferred yellow-flag cases, and provided blue emergency relief twenty-three times; and twenty-eight special activities in 2023 covered more than 1,230 person-times of young people, up 35 percent over 2022. Theoretically, the case corroborates deliberative democratic theory in three respects: substantive participation, transparent operation, and continuous feedback achieve the unity of procedural and substantive justice; pluralistic forms lower participation thresholds and give voice to the young and the old, embodying inclusive governance; and the problem- and result-oriented use of deliberation confirms that governance effectiveness is positively correlated with decision-making quality.

Successful deliberative governance requires not only institutional design and resource integration but also cultural foundation and emotional bonds. Through its “Soul-Forging Project”, Community G integrates core socialist values into the entire deliberative process: twelve “Red Storytelling Meetings” by veteran soldiers and Party members attracted 860 person-times of youth participation and generated 217 learning reflections; “lecture + discussion” sessions on the guiding principles of the 20th CPC National Congress produced twenty-six pieces of advice, five of which were adopted; and practical posts such as “community junior managers” and “junior grid workers” enable value internalization through experience. Emotional bonds are cultivated through an institutionalized pairing network of fifty-six “Five Elders” members with 105 young people, which carried out eighty-nine activities and resolved 127 practical difficulties in 2023; emotionalized platforms such as “Listening to Grandpa Tell Stories of the Past” let deliberation proceed amid emotional resonance; and two-way empowerment—including “digital back-feeding”, in which young people teach elders to use smartphones for online deliberation—fosters mutual learning across generations. Cultural inheritance provides further vehicles: an “Intangible Cultural Heritage Innovation Workshop” combines crafts training with deliberation on innovative transmission; solar-term occasions host events such as the “dumpling banquet cum community council”; and folk activities are paired with governance initiatives such as the “community safety talk for all”, which gathered fifty-six resident suggestions. Theoretically, the case demonstrates the mutual construction of cultural governance and deliberative democracy: culture supplies the symbolic resources and frames of meaning that serve as the medium of deliberation; intergenerational emotional bonds reduce deliberation costs and build trust. and the value consensus formed through sustained immersion provides the prerequisite for rational deliberation, confirming that a community of values underpins a community of governance.