A Study On China's Central Government Legal Supervision Mechanism On Local Governments

There is a basic principal in every country's history: central government owns the power of ultimate control to local governments. If the power was lost, local government would developed to a independent unit, and the coutry would lost the unified base. However, if local governments lose their autonomy completely, obeying central directives blindly, they will also lose their significance as government and become the agency of central government, which is not in line with the state's fundamental interests. Therefore, in the statutory framework, assuring the central government get effective control and enabling local governments to get a certain autonomy and enthusiasm, are the eternal theme of the study on relationship between central and local authorities. The paper is trying to explore our country's central government legal supervision on local governments systematically on the background of constitution.The first part of the paper explains the basic theory of central government legal supervision on local governments in the dimension of constitution. Firstly, when it comes to the analysis of the relationship between central and local government, the author jumps out of the thinking mode of "single" and "federalism" in the past, but turns to a special angle of vertical decentralization in the context of constitution, tying to re-interpretate the word "federation" and the basic relation between central and local government. Secondly, the paper explains the theory base of central government legal supervision on local governments: decentralization, local autonomy and legal supervision. That is to say, the legal supervision could only be effective in a reasonable mode of decentralization, under the support of local democracy and autonomy. Finally, the paper summarizes the concept of central government legal supervision on local governments, and directs the main forms of it, which are legislative, financial and judicial supervision.The second part of the paper compares and summers up the main contents of central government legal supervision on local governments in United States and France. In fact, the judicial supervision under the support of federal decentralized model in United States is a relatively mature supervision mechanism, and the "trinity" of the legal supervision mechanisms composed of legislative, judicial and financial in France is also worthy of study.The third part of the paper analyses concretely the main problems of central government legal supervision on local governments in China, those are non-institutionalized administrative supervision, conventional personnel control and weak financial supervision in "tax system". The author also ascribes the causes, which are simplicity of power division, lack of judicial supervision, lack of autonomy in local government and ineffective financial supervision.The fourth part of the paper tries to improve the central government legal supervision on local governments in China. On one hand, the paper clarifies the background of improving the central government legal supervision on local governments, those are "to expand inner-party democracy leading to people democratic" policy established in 17th Chinese Communist Party Congress, the development of supervision mechainism of People's Congress and grass-roots democracy. On the other hand, the paper puts forward concrete recommendations for the central government legal supervision on local governments in China, including explicite rules of law in decentralization between the central and local government, improvement of the legal system of transfer payments in "tax system", establishment of controversies legal settlement mechanism of central on local government.