Understanding And Surpassing: New Public Service And Administrative Reform In China

New Public Service(NPS) is a new kind of administrative pattern which is put forward by Robert B.Denhardt, an American scholar, on the basis of criticizing of new public management, and it has received many scholars' esteem both at home and abroad. In China, scholars' absorbing and learning from NPS mainly reflected on the research of service-oriented government, which has become a highlight in the academic community. Most scholars believe that it is a substitution to new public management(NPM), which represents the direction of developing of public administration in the 21st century, certainly can become a theoretical support to construct the public service-oriented government in contemporary China. However, they seem to ignore this fact : NPS has originated in these countries which have a relatively developed capitalist economy, administrative traditions of Weber's bureaucratic system and have undergone NPM, with a specific political, economic and social conditions linked.This thesis is on the background above. Firstly, it has made a thorough definition from many aspects: background and theoretical origins, concept and content and so on, and considered NPS a group of interrelated beliefs and values within a certain knowledge system; Secondly, taking American "Citizen First" Campaign, the Best Value Pattern of British Local Government, Australian Public Service Act and South Korea's Kind Service Movement for examples, it expounded the practice of NPS, and completed the "understanding" to NPS; Moreover, it has inspected the ecological system of Chinese public administration according to NPS standards, and inferred that many factors have restricted the production and implementation of NPS in contemporary China, such as less-developed market economy, a less rational bureaucratic system, imperfect constitutional and legal system, lacking strong consciousness of democracy and participation, weak civil society; Finally, it pointed out the way of Chinese public administration reform: further improve the rational bureaucracy and take drawing lessons from NPS etc.as a strategy, and achieve a multi-dimensional governance pattern mainly based on rational bureaucracy, supplemented by NPM and NPS. This conclusion may be a"surmounting"to esteeming NPS blindly.