Study On The Necessity Of Establishing Professional Public Relations Agency For Chinese Government In The New Era

Nowadays, most of the enterprises have set up agencies specifically to deal with public relations (PR) affairs as PR created a great opportunity for them to build a good image, improve reputation and bring a huge profit with its30year’s development in China. In contrast, Chinese government hasn’t yet established such specialized agency, but restricted the use of PR in some major functional departments instead. As a result, numerous regret and insufficient existed in government’s PR work, which affected government’s overall work efficiency. Thereby, how to coordinate the interests and contradictions between government departments, between the society and the government, how to take full advantage of existing and potential resources to improve rapid response capability to deal with special affairs and to build "brand China", is a test that modern government will face.Some developed countries and emerging economies have been concluded on the question of whether to establish a professional PR agency for the government or not. They analyzed their political basis, economic environment, cultural characteristics and international image a long time ago, and set up their government PR agencies then with strategic significance which favored the president, companies and national competitiveness.In view of this, to enhance the status of the professional PR agency in our government is even more important because it is determined by the development of government public relations and the objective needs to shape the image and improve the function of the government. This paper based on international perspective, describes the features and benefits of the functions of PR agency though analyzing current situation of some overseas government’s cases and elaborates the value of it from the perspective of institutional settings to provide useful guidance for the positioning of the PR agency. To emphasize, this paper also demonstrates the necessity of establishing the PR agency for Chinese government form four aspects. They are:the development of market economy, the need of social transformation, the enhancement of government functions and the creation of national reputation.