Towards Good Government

Good Government means "being good at governing" and "implementing good governance", the former focuses on governance capability, while the latter emphasizes governance morality. The "Good Government" involved here chiefly refers to "implementing good governance". Good governance is citizen's expectation and ideal upon its government, which, however, is being challenged by corruption in this economic globalization era. Honest and clean governance is on the opposite side of corruption. To realize the good governance, we have to strengthen the building of the honest governance first. Only in this way can public servants enhance their moral standards for the honest governance. Besides, real good governance can be realized after internalizing honest governance systems and relevant laws as the moral requirements for them.Honest governance is one of the moral requirements for public servants' work and a measure, mean or method for ensuring public servants to exercise their power for people. The core of the honest governance is that public servants can resist against various temptations. In the national political area, the realization of the honest governance not only relies on relevant laws and systems, but also on the related morality, namely, the honest governance morality. In modern society, the moral significance of the honest governance stands out. In fact, people have long considered officials' jobbery, corruption and bureaucracy as wrongdoings and then despised such misconducts. The honest governance is in line with the people's pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty and can promote the realization of such pursuit, so it is of moral reason. In ancient China, the honest governance, an essential aspect of "Good governance", was paid great attention by statesmen and thinkers in history, thus playing a very important role in Chinese traditional culture. As Zhou Rites—a Confucian classic records, there were six significant conditions for a good ruling: good, competent, respectable, fair, lawful and eloquent. Also, Events of Warring States written by Yan Ying claims that honest governance is the basic requirement for a regime. During the long history, "kindheartedness", giving beneficence to people in a broad scope, has long been the fundamental principle of the honest governance ideology, forming the honest governance morality system with special meaning. This morality system includes exercise of power compliant to proper morality, more contribution to government but less personal considerations, fairness, frugality and straightness, etc. The implementation mechanism of the honest governance in ancient China had not only the regulations at system layer, but also the moral education covering school education, family education and social education and official moral civilization as well—it is still of practical significance to the honest governance morality in modern China.Different cultures would create different conceptions of honest governance morality and then establish different honest governance system. The liberalism based on the "Human nature is basically evil", reasonable understanding on power and law's supremacy in the west world exerts far-reaching influence upon their honest morality construction. As Aristotle put it in his Politics, the most important law for governance is that all regimes should legislate properly and formulate economic systems, which prevent officials from jobbery and personal gains. The western countries have gone through many explorations on the theories and practice of building laws system for the honest governance. Since 60s and 70s of the last century, many countries have strengthened their legislations for the honest governance to prevent corruption and formulated general daily behavior codes for public servants, such as laws of declaration of public servants' personal properties and disciplines for them. In addition, the western countries pay great attention to good governance with moral means, and they have had relatively perfect moral responsibility code and combined the legal system construction with moral system. By administrative moral legislation, they intend to regularize the executive moral behaviors of public servants by laws. With the establishment of public servant system, the honest governance legislations in the western countries is improving gradually during the process of social and economic development and is shaping a complete set of systems, being of great referential significance to the moral construction of the honest governance in China.After the founding of New China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been witnessing beneficial exploration and practices in the field of the moral construction of the honest governance and acquired fruitful achievements. Especially since the reform and opening up to the outside world in China, CPC, adhering to the concept of "Serve people heart and soul" and the important thoughts of "Three Representatives" and scientific development outlook, has established a series of laws and regulations for combating corruption and building a clean government and administer its officials with stated systems, effectively restraining the stemming and spread of corruptions. The moral building of the honest governance in modern China should inherit and carry forward the fine moral traditions of the Chinese nation, learn from in a scientific way and take in the successful experience and advanced civilized results of moral construction of the honest governance all over the world and base on the actual situation in current China and pave the way for future. Besides, we should attach enough importance to and give full play to social opinions. With the influence of the social opinions, moral level of public servants should be enhanced and moral construction of the honest governance would be strengthened. For corruption and moral disorientation issue in building a clean government, we should further improve laws or regulations for a clean government to make the moral construction and its supervision systematized and to enhancing the moral level of public servants by educating them with the laws. Further, in light of the various actual situations on public servants at different levels, we should take different education methods to take actions for specific problems. And we should emphasize the practical effects, strengthen the self-discipline awareness of the cadres and lead them to uplift their moral level. Corruption can be basically controlled and good governance can be realized only after strengthening the moral construction of public servants, helping them erect correct moral outlook and enhancing their moral level.The 6th plenary session of the 16th CPC Central Committee has made an important decision of constructing a harmonious socialist society in China. To achieve this goal, we should first unswervingly oppose corruption. With the smooth progress of harmonious society, continued improvement of democratic legislation and deepening of ideas of justness and fairness, it is expected that moral level of public servants would be enhanced accordingly. As a result, combating corruption and building a clean government would face an increasingly improving situation and then implementing good governance would also become conscious actions of public servants.