The residents' committee (simplified Chinese: 居民委员会; traditional Chinese: 居民委員會; pinyin: jūmín wěiyuánhuì), shortened as juweihui or juwei in Chinese, also translated as neighborhood committee, residents' association, residential committee, is a grassroots mass autonomous organization for self-management, self-education and self-service for residents in the People's Republic of China.

The status of a residents' committee is equivalent to that of a villagers' committee in the countryside, both of which do not belong to the state organs.

On 23 October 1949, the representatives of the residents of Shangyangshi Street, Shangcheng District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, elected the first residents' committee of the People's Republic of China, the Shangyangshi Street Residents' Committee.

Residents’ committees emerged in the early 1950s in major cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s model of democratic governance. By October 1951, 1,904 committees, under the supervision of 129 street offices, had been established. The committees transmitted state policies, mediated neighborhood disputes, addressed welfare and daily residential concerns, and functioned as grassroots surveillance for the state. Their structures, functions, and names varied until standardized regulations were established by the National People’s Congress in 1954.

When the Chinese Communist Party took over Shanghai in 1949, it faced the urgent need to improve public facilities, sanitation, safety, and social welfare, especially in impoverished neighborhoods. The Department of Civil Administration (DCA) was in charge of organizing Shanghai residents in urban areas into residents’ committees, initially composed mainly of male residents, and addressing residential issues in support of industrial production. Housewives, classified as “workers’ family dependents (jiashu),” were regarded as personnel to be mobilized to work in residents’ committees to provide services to male industrial workers. The mobilization of unemployed and “unproductive” housewives served the project of national reconstruction and socialist modernization. It also aligned with many CCP members’ belief, as shown by the party-led grassroots organization Shanghai Women’s Federation, that women should be liberated from backwardness and the constraints of the old “feudal” society through social involvement.

Recruitment of committee members was based on residence, and the membership was mixed-sex, but housewives were particularly valued because they were viewed by the government as politically reliable, on the assumption that they had limited social networks. Housewives were also valued as a stable workforce, since the higher employment rate among male residents prevented them from performing effectively in neighborhood work.

Prior to the DCA’s efforts, mobilization of housewives has been initiated by Shanghai Democratic Women’s Federation (SDWF, later renamed Shanghai Women’s Federation) in 1949. In 1952, the SDWF established a women’s congress that elected a women’s committee. Through its attention to women’s specific concerns, the women’s committee attracted broader participation of women residents, especially housewives, than the male-dominated residents’ committee had. It was soon regarded by the DCA as a competitor of the residents’ committee “for cadres, for the masses, and for work."

This inter-institutional friction was addressed after a rectification campaign in residential areas that began in 1953. During the campaign, large numbers of male committee members with suspicious political backgrounds (former landlords, former Nationalist Party members, etc.), as well as those who abused power in local administration, were removed and replaced by women. By 1954, women made up 54.6 percent of residents’ committee members, up from 37.3 percent in 1953. The 1954 Regulations on Residents’ Committees stipulated women-work committees as a component of the residents’ committees. In 1955, the municipal government formally established the DCA’s regulation that women’s congresses were integral yet subordinate bodies of residents’ committees, and were only allowed to communicate women’s demands to the committee without carrying out their own work. Historian Wang Zheng argues that, by subordinating the “mass organization” of women to the government branch, the party-state established the assisting rather than leading role of women-work in local governance.