"municipal County" Reform Study. Government Relations Perspective

Along with the continuous deepening of Reform & Opening-up and the booming of market economy, county economy is unprecedentedly appreciated and concerned. Ever since the first pilot of Zhejiang province in 1992, the province of Henan, Guangdong, Hebei, Jilin, Hubei, Sichuan & etc. have carried out the Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing County successively, stimulating the vitality of the countries'economic development by decentralizing part of economy and social management authority and expanding the autonomy of county government.Regarding intergovernmental relation theory as research perspective, analyzing the current situation of the relationship among provincial, municipal and county government under City-Managing-County System from the aspect of local government' powers, property rights, duties allocation & etc. In this article, we think that the administrative level between county government is too much under City-Managing-County System and it is not conductive to the operation of county governments'administrative efficiency; financial resources from county government are weakened since financial management power is controlled by higher-level government while social management responsibility is delegated to the county government and it faces heavy burden in handling public affairs as well. City-Managing-County System is the product under the planned economy, with the accelerating of industrialization, marketization and informationization, it comes into bring a "counter-driven" trend for some countries with strong economy and municipal governments' economic radiation function is weakened gradually. It believes in this article that the Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing Counties is necessary in order to increase the autonomy of the county governments'development, improve governments'administrative capacity and strengthen country economy.This article studies the system effect of Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing County and the difficulties faced in promotion of Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing County, through analyzing the case of Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing County conducted in Zhejiang, Hubei and Sichuan province. It thinks in this article that the obstacle faced in optimizing county government relationship in Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing County lies in fuzzy boundaries at all levels of government power, isomorphic responsibility, mismatching between powers and property right & etc. Therefore, we suggest in this article to establish a new partnership between cities and county, embedding a relation mode of Negotiation-Cooperation in the predominant relation mode of Command-Obedience among provincial, municipal and country government; establish and improve high-efficient power mechanism and the interests sharing and incentives in economy development and the Negotiation-Cooperation Mechanism about public service and residents demand. As to the specific path choice of Reform of Expanding Powers & Reinforcing Counties, we propose to innovate government hierarchical structure, implement separate-governing, further transform government functions, re-divide the responsibility and authority of governments, carry out institutional decentralization and perfect supervision system & etc.