On The Transition To Rule Of Law In State Governance Performance

Legitimacy is a major issue related to state governance reform and lasting political stability, especially important for China with its economy and society stepping into deep transition period. Over the past 60 years, with the rapid development and continuous "high performance"(namely the so called "China Model"), China has drawn great attention of the world. But behind "high performance", there does also exist a worry, which is "loneliness at the top". Scholars have pointed that China’s governance may have typical dependence on "performance legitimacy". It is indicated that "high performance" as a basis of legitimacy has a continuously evolving type characteristic through further grading inspection for history of development of new China. While based on the appraisal from three dimensions of its stabilization and persistence, fitness to economic system as well as social integration function, or due to disintegration of traditional society structure and performance motivation caused by economic marketization and science and technology modernization, this country are facing a situation with high-performance power depletion or multi-element dissipation. If blindly keep to "performance legitimacy", it will face a daunting prospect. The cause also lies in its traditional performance root and reality performance type in lack of rule-of-law. For all this, this text puts forward and discusses the core proposition that "establish the rule-of-law in state governance performance". Based on the inherent conjunction of market mechanism and rule-of-law principles as well as the urgent demand for rule-of-law integration by plural society, it shall treat that establishing a state governance performance of rule-of-law as an ideal goal for China’s current governance performance transition. As the rule-of-law has many functions to state governance performance operation, like value guidance, organizational coordination, institutional normalization and practice integration, it makes the foundation of state political legitimacy capable to surpass traditional performance dependency and extend to procedurual democracy and other aspects.This text is divided into six chapters in total. It successively discusses the key problems to state governance performance transition such as its motivation, purpose, path, obstacles and countermeasures, by confluent adopting methods like theoretical and empirical analysis, normative and positive analysis as well as case and statistical research. First, based on theoretical basis on performance system and behavioral motive, it adopts binary angle of view between government and the public to construct one theoretical model of performance typology analysis, and obtain four basically state governance performance types through model deduction. Second, viewing the process of new China’s governance performance transition from the model, it can generally classify that from 1949 to 1977 into a vision-type performance, and from 1978 to 1992 into a utilitarian performance. But they both couldn’t continue due to its "imperfect legal system"; while after 1993 and especially in the 21 st century, the shock of social and economic transition brings the country into a stage losing its governance performance type but urgent to establish rule-of-law. Third, to design the rule-of-law system in state governance performance as a transition goal, it formally should include integration of performance goals, mutual promotion of performance behaviors and reasonableness of performance allocations between government and the public, and essentially has standards in universality of performance orientation, democracy of performance desition-making, effectiveness of performance implementation, sustainability of performance result, equity of performance distribution as well as efficiency of performance communication. However, empirical analysis of China’s present governance performance type displays that there is a gap between reality and those ideal standards. The case from budgeting performance governance of G province furtherly show the value orientation and practice requirement of rule-of-law has interference or even contrary with that of performance, which may lead to deviations between the budget input directions and its legal functions, budget process specification and result effectiveness as well as different dimensional budget results. Therefore, in order to promote the rule of law in state governance performance and extend the basis for its political legitimacy, it requires to make great efforts in terms of balancing the performance and rule-of-law as oriented values, perfecting the rule-of-law organizational mechanism for normalizing and guiding the state governance performance, accelerating the legalization in fundamental fields of performance, and thus tamping and solidifying the overall motive of state governance performance.