Community management has transformed alongside China's economic, population and urban growth.

Related: Neighborly calling

Most people think of the archetypical neighborhood committee member as an old retired woman, who's chatty and warm but sometimes annoying. She spends her days checking household registrations and mediating neighborhood conflicts.

The country's first neighborhood committee started in October 1949, on Shangyangshi Street in Zhejiang's provincial capital Hangzhou.

The baojia system - a type of neighborhood watch that had been in place from the Song Dynasty (AD 420-479) - survived through the first few years of New China.

The current system - "juweihui" in Chinese - was officially established in 1954.

It was conceived as "a grassroots organization for urban residents to self-govern, self-educate and self-serve".

In 1989, the Neighborhood Committee Organizational Law was passed. It was enacted on Jan 1, 1990, clarifying committees' structures and functions.

The committees were small units before then, and there were often a dozen on one street.

The government began restructuring the system in 2002 to meet rapid urbanization's needs. It began integrating smaller committees into larger ones and adding community service stations.

This new form of the institution was formally renamed as the "community neighborhood committee".

The country has more than 100,000 neighborhood committees, the Ministry of Civil Affairs reports.

More than 360,000 people in the whole country like Wang Zhenxiang and Yang Jinghui are working for their neighborhoods.

Many cities began adopting the "community grid management system" in 2011. It's based on the idea of subdividing communities by population to improve efficiency. The model is intended to release members from their routines to shift from "problem solvers" to "problem discoverers".

Government bodies, law enforcement and other social organizations, including public security bureaus, courts, fire stations and industrial and commercial bureaus, assign staff to different grids.

The grid system also incorporates digital management that uses security cameras, cloud computing and hotlines.