A Study On Citizen Participation In The Government Public Decision-Making In Contemporary China

The government public decision-making is a predominant way to provide public service and governance. Whether citizen participates in the process of government public decision-making, and the process of government public decision-making meets the needs of the social public or not determines the legitimacy, rationality and feasibility of government public decisions. Along with the deepening and development of Chinese reform and opening-up, the international and domestic environments that contemporary China lies in have changed tremendously, and citizen participation in the process of government public decision-making has already become a noticeable political phenomenon. This is not only an objective requirement of systematic reform of government public decision-making, but also reflects tendency of administration democratization development, which is a important part of Chinese democracy and politics construction Based on the reality of politics in modern society in China, and taken basic principles of Marxism politics as the instruction, this thesis analyzes citizen participation in Chinese government public decision-making from the theory of governance and good governance, which functions as the basic theoretic premise of the analysis. The thesis also argues that there exists certain intrinsic logical relations among evolution of government management pattern, systematic reform of government public decision-making and citizen participation in government public decision-making. The present evolution process of Chinese government management pattern determines the direction and path of systematic reform of government public decision-making, through which vigorous development of citizen participation in government public decision-making is promoted. On the basis of narrating developing process of citizen participation in Chinese government public decision-making, the thesis discusses the theoretic and realistic problems of citizen participation in government public decision-making from three aspects, that is, ecological environment, ability and mechanism of citizen participation, and argues that it will have to face such issues as shortage of participation channel, lack of government response and low degree of institutionalization. In view of the problems, this thesis probes and brings forth the elementary thread of developing and perfecting Chinese government public decision-making from the three levels: reforming government management, improving ability of citizen participation and innovating mechanism.