Study On The Guangzhou’s Complaint Letters And Visits Mechanism In The Period Of Social Transformation

The complaint letters and visits mechanism is a unique system with Chinese characteristics. Implemented for more than five decades, the system plays a fundamental role in voicing concerns, solving problems, handling complaints and conflicts of and among the public. However, as China pushes on reform and opening up with a growing market economy, modern society in this transitional period is also becoming more and more diversified. Governments are now handling more types of conflicts and disputes with growing awareness of citizenship among the people and the resulting growth of demands to express their political and democratic appeals. As the forefront of China’s reform and opening up policy, Guangzhou applies many new measures in answering new characteristics of the transitional society and new requirements on letters and visits practices, especially in clearing up complaints reporting channels for the people, and in effective mediation of public conflicts and disputes. These measures have been effectively and widely applied, and call for deeper analysis and research. Through systematic study of letters and visits case studies of Guangzhou in recent years, this article enumerates several issues widely exist in nowadays letters and visits work, and makes an in-depth analysis of possible reasons behind these issues. It also tries to raise suggestions and recommendations on improvement of letters and visits practices, by analyzing Guangzhou’s recent innovative use of and thought provoking experiment on new letters and visits handling measures. The discussion is specified and with practical implications. There are sixth parts in this article. The first part explains the background, purpose and methodology of analysis; the second part analyzes practises and problems in Guangzhou’s letters and visits work; the third part focus on analyzing factors that affect the quality of Guangzhou’s letters and visits work and summarizes measures applied in Guangzhou’ letters and visits work in recent years; the forth part introduces useful experience and implications of domestic and foreign practices in handling complaint letters and visits; the fifth part raises suggestions and recommendations; and the sixth part makes conclusions and expectations.