Study Of City Administration During Initial Founding Period Of PRC (1949---1957)

The initial founding period of People's Republic of China (PRC), ranges from 1949 to 1957, makes a turning point between the past and future. During the most important historical transferring period, the nature of Chinese society made a great shift from semi-colony & semi-feudal one to the new democracy and socialism. With the alteration of the social nature, world-shaking changes took place in different levels of social stratum by taking the city as the vital carrier in the transform while the object of city management including various aspects such as economy; politics, society, and culture took on prominent differences. Accordingly, city government, the principal part of the city administration, administered the object in the development by continuously adjusting its management organization, management method, and improving the administration capacity. This paper makes a division of the early seven years period into three stages and explores its development features of city administration.The first stage is the military control time when the city was in chaos in all aspects, so the initial task of the administration then is to renew and stabilize the social order implemented from four aspects: (1) the city government took over the former regime; (2) managed the working staff of the former government; (3) made good use of every means in an effort to renew the social order; (4) carried on works of stabilizing commodity prices to win the confidence from citizen.The second stage is the recovery period of national economy when the administration focuses will on rebuilding of the normal social economy order andstabilizing the new city regime. So based on the original structural establishment, urban regime set their principal work into three categories in accordance with its management requirement in order to achieve that goal: first, resume and develop the urban economy; second, reinforce the administration power of the municipality to improve the infrastructural facilities, hygienic condition and city environment; third, propel the cultural education progress of the city.The third stage is the first five-year plan period when the main task for administration was to provide all kinds of favorable conditions for the economy construction. Thus, the principal part of the management board was renewed to four great management teams consist of Party Committee, City Government, People's Congress and People's Consultative Conference of the City to carry on the city administration together. Meanwhile, the basic-level organ of political power setting was perfected to form a threefold administration mode within two-rank government which ranges from local government to subdistrict office or from police station to residents' committee.The last part of the paper serves as a conclusion which generalizes the regularities of the development of city administration during the initial founding period of PRC by concluding three features as follows: (a) it embodies the highly unified development course between the local city and the nation, (b) great progress has been made on the city administration of the seven years in its power, profundity, and extent, and (c) the early seven years of the founding period is the formation of the city administration system of socialism.To summarize, the city administration during the early years of the initial founding period of PRC has laid the groundwork for the management in the new China. Study of city administration about this period is valuable in helping us find the regularity at that time as well as providing some references on relative reform.