Rational Bureaucracy Or New Public Management

Administrative system reform has become a hot topic in recent years, and almost every country in the world is carrying out such reform. Since the year 2003, the government of China decided to conduct the fifth administrative system reform, the whole nation has been experiencing a new wave of government revolution. Administrative system reform needs to be designed and guided from the theoretical aspect, and Chinese government unprecedented needs theory to direct its reform course, however, lack of relevant theories all along is the bottleneck in the administrative development. Rational bureaucracy and the prevailing new public management (NPM) are two administrative modes existing in present western countries. Relying on its advanced politics, economy and culture, developed countries exerted a great demonstration effect on the developing ones, and its administrative reform modes from the notions arising and theories forming to the practice functioning have received generous responses from the developing countries which are changing from conventionality to modernity. China is no exception. The argument on adopting rational bureaucracy or NPM has been the focus in the academic field recently. Based on that, the article combs the research achievements in administrative modes by summarizing the documents presented and expounds rational bureaucracy and NPM's relative merits. Then the author, using the method of comparative research, analyzes their suitability to China's biological conditions, and constructs a mutual-supplementary public administrative pattern with Chinese characteristics, in which rational bureaucracy plays a dominant role and NPM plays an auxiliary role. This paper covers four parts: Part I: Beginning with its contents, this part discusses that rational bureaucracy, as an administrative system pursuing formal rationality, has some historical reasonableness. But at the time when the developed countries came into post-industry era, rational bureaucracy betrayed its shortcomings and became a rigid and inefficient government system. Part II: The author sets froth NPM's contents, achievements and defects, pointing out that this pattern has its unique characters in the reform measures, but the possibility to surpass rational bureaucracy is still in doubt. Part III: This part thoroughly analyzes rational bureaucracy and NPM's suitability to China's economy, politics and culture, and then concludes, from the analysis, that China's administrative reform should rely mainly on rational bureaucracy while making NPM subsidiary. Part IV: Referring to ideal bureaucracy and absorbing NPM's quintessence, this part, taking China's special conditions into full consideration, constructs a brand-new government administrative pattern.