Bureaucracy, Game Of Interests And Governmental Action

In the veins of organization theory and China's political history, this dissertation, as a case study of an urban-rural town government in Hangzhou, is the study of this type of governments'investment, land acquisition, and stability maintenance from the perspective of the theory of bureaucracy, to reveal the logic of local governments' behaviors and their roles in local governance since the middle and late 1990s.This study finds that township governments not only obey the rules of bureaucracy and abide by the laws of market competition, but respond to higher pressures from state, market and society, and have interest game with higher levels of government, enterprises and farmers in the exercise of autonomy, from the perspectives of bureaucracy and organization. As a result, they change the rules of bureaucracy and the state's strategy of rural economic development. In the transformation of rural economic development strategies, the bureaucracy has not withdrawn from the village governance, but re-dominate rural socio-economic development in a new way, mainly from the direct management of small-scale rural enterprises to taking control of entire jurisdiction as a business unit, from the direct interaction between main village cadres and farmers to direct communication between town government officials and farmers, from depending mainly on the traditional rural micro-network to relying mainly on modern bureaucratic organizations to maintain social stability. This shift promotes the local government to rebuild the state, market and society, and to govern society from changes in the external environment, and to optimize local governance.At the same time, in response to pressures from the market, state and society, the misconduct of local governments and their officials leads to policy distortions, corruption, and strained relations between the Government and the public. To solve these problems and improve local governance, the state's promotion of industrialization, marketization and urbanization should be accompanied by the establishment of responsible government, service-oriented government, and by the improvement of the bureaucratic organization and standardization of government behaviors, to make it more responsive to the needs of society and the people, and to promote the sustainable development of local governance to achieve good governance.