Leading To Participatory Budgeting

In China, the process of public policy-making, especially in the field of public budgeting has long been dominated by technological politicians. It seems that there is no compromise between technological budgeting and budgeting democracy. This situation has started to be changed. With a better sense of participation, the public have been asking for more substantial rights in the decision-making process about public affairs. At he same time, democracy and fairness in the distribution of common resources is being urged by the unstoppable reform and deepening of public management, especially the reform of public finance institution. So it is strongly needed to find a way to match technological budgeting and budgeting democracy. Participatory budgeting is that kind of innovative practice. It first occurred in Brazil and then was spread into many countries. In China, "Democratic Consultation" in the city of WenLing, Zhejiang Province, has referred to Brazilian experience to optimize its own process. And the cities of Wuxi and Haerbin has been trying Brazilian experience in their own cities. These are the two types of Chinese participatory budgeting, which is now helping to improve the process of public management. This article is trying to make a systematical analysis about the present status and future development of Chinese participatory budgeting.There are four parts of this article:The first part is a summarization of this article, with the research background, literature review ,definition of participatory budgeting and the research framework included.The second part is on the present status of participatory budgeting in China. After a brief introduction of the process of these two kinds of participatory budgeting, the article narrates the present positive outcome of participatory budgeting and then elaborate the deficiency of this practice.The third part is on the challenges and opportunities of participatory budgeting in China. The challenges include the world-wide challenges and some others only in the special environment in China. Then the opportunities is briefly narrated.The fourth part is on the future development. The article tries to make a systematical goal structure, according to which, advice is provided to improve the present and potential functions of participatory budgeting. Those advice is respectively elaborated for different stages of the development.As an innovative practice, participatory budgeting has been in the research for years in China. But most of the researches are on the introduction of Brazilian experiences and practice process of China, with an absence of systematically reflective thinking. According to this, the article is trying to make some breakthrough about the research topics, so some reflective thinking about the existing practice, challenges and opportunities, and future development as well are all included in this article, aiming to a comprehensive analysis of participatory budgeting in China.