Municipal Administration Reform And The Early Modernization Of China City

Taking the relationship between municipal administration, municipal administration reform, and the city modernization as a main line, this article comprehensively probes into Hankou municipal administration and "the municipal administration reform" in the 20—30's of the 20th century, by the application of multi-disciplinary approaches such as urban sociology, urban culture, city geography, urban planning, urban ecology.It studies the structure of modern cities' municipal systems and their operational mechanisms, discusses the path and the general pattern of the municipal administrative transformation, assesses the city autonomy and the achievement and problems of residents' political participation, through the analysis of the composition of Hankou Special City, the Hankou Municipality, "Hankou City Temporary Regulations" and "Wuhan Special Municipal Government Organizational Rules" and other correlative stipulations. Through reorganizing the historical data concerning the relationship between the government and non-governmental organizations (mainly the chambers of commerce and the trade associations), the article studies the form, the content, the sense and the mentality of the citizens in the participation in constructing modern cities after urban construction became more government oriented, from the angles of relationship between citizens and the government and particularly between citizens and the city, it also further discusses citizens' public concept, autonomous consciousness, and democratic consciousness. Through inspecting the measures taken by the Hankou Authorities learning from the foreign concessions in an attempt of "municipal reforms", and seeking the unification of the municipal administration, the author discusses how a modern city government (with modernized and the national consciousness) maintains the balance among nationalism, the administrative unification and the tension of modernization, that is, how to deal with, according to the international law, administrative issues and disputes of foreign concessions, consulates, and foreign firms, and how to protect the integrity of the city planning, the construction and the management, and at the same time maintain the city government's effective authority and the realization of the general goal of urban modernization through learning from European and American practice and experiences. The article also contributes a large portion to the introduction of Hankou urban planning, the city construction and the city management, but it mainly focuses on how the government improved the general quality of citizens' life and cultivated their ways of modern urban life through planning and rebuilding the city in a "modern manner".Moreover, the article studies "municipal administration" but is not limited in the topic and...