Improving government public management capacity and delivering quality public services to citizens are pivotal to building service-oriented government and ensuring a smooth and successful societal transformation. Public service delivery is one of the core functions of government.
From 2010 to 2014, with the generous support from the Lien Foundation in Singapore, the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration at Nanyang Technological University developed the “Lien Public Service Excellence Index for Chinese Cities to evaluate and rank the quality of public service delivery provided by local governments in China. The Lien Project has been the largest survey of its kind ever conducted in China.
Each year, the Lien Project surveyed a random sample of over 25,000 citizens, covering all capital cities of China plus some key cities. The findings from the Lien Project provide first hand empirical evidence to measure the quality of public service delivery in China.
The longitudinal nature of our research data enables us to compare the performances of cities over time in public service delivery. The Index consists of five sub-dimensions of public service: citizens’ overall satisfaction of the public service delivery, public service effectiveness, government transparency, citizen participation, and public trust in government. The comparative results reveal some improvement over the years in their public service quality and public management capacity, providing new evidence about the dynamics of building service-oriented government in China. However, the study also finds some consistent weakness in the public service quality, such as government transparency and particularly in citizen participation.
Another remarkable finding from this longitudinal study is that the geographic pattern of service-oriented government in Chinese cities has been substantially transformed. Many inland and less developed cities are catching up in their public service quality.
These research findings are important not only because they help us monitor and understand the process of building service-oriented government in China, but also help generate timely and appropriate policy recommendations to guide such processes in general.
