Bring the Citizens Back In: Lessons from Local Government Innovation in China

It is an urgent challenge for the Chinese government to reshape its state-society relationship. After thirty years’ reform and opening up, China’s society has become more diverse and complicated. However, the Chinese... [ view full abstract ]

It is an urgent challenge for the Chinese government to reshape its state-society relationship. After thirty years’ reform and opening up, China’s society has become more diverse and complicated. However, the Chinese government remains to be a closed system, within which citizens are excluded from the public policy making process. Some scholars argue that if the Chinese government doesn't reform its system, it will be incapable of facilitating the representation of China’s diverse social interests or mediating the conflict between the state and society (Pei, 2008).

In recent years, local government in China has initiated many different types of governance innovation, all aims to re-shape the state-society relationship. On the one hand, local governments are providing more public services to its citizens. On the other hand, local governments has built new social governance mechanisms to promote citizen participation. However, empirical study has pointed out that citizens were still excluded from the policy making process of these government innovation. Case studies and interviews reveals that government officials remains to be the main actors behind the local government innovation.

Will the “silent” citizens actually be benefited from local government innovation? Two main findings are reported based on a random telephone survey of nineteen local government innovation projects from Zhejiang, between September and October, 2014. First of all, the innovation projects are effective institutions to improve governance performance. The survey shows that the deeper citizens involve in the innovation projects, the higher they value its effectiveness. Secondly, the innovation projects haven’t brought its full play in promoting good governance. On the one hand, the current innovations are not benefitting the majority of citizens, as most of the projects only cover a small proportion of local residents. On the other hand, citizens tends to accept public services instead of participating the social governance mechanisms. The effective institutional arrangement of local government innovation and the limitation of its practice shows that bringing more citizens to participate government innovation is the key to improve governance performance.