Research On The Government Letters And Visits System From The Polity Perspective

It is generally believed that the starting point of the letters and visits system is "A decision of handling people’s letters and visits" issued by former Administration Council. However, the similar system can be traced to the end of the primitive stage of ancient China. In essence, the letters and visits system is a part of China’s polity system, in which the rule of law has not been completely established. The process of dealing with complaint cases in letters and visits system can be divided as follows:Letters and visits bureau accept the case-local leader write instructions-relevant functional departments do the executive work-the final results must be approved by the local leader again. So, the process is the embodiment of local leader’s individual will.Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economic system reform has made a remarkable achievement, not only economy increase, social structure and interest of different social groups has changed greatly, people tend to be more prone to accept democracy and the rule of law and defend personal rights and interests. But China’s political system reform is relatively lags behind, the rule-of-law level is not high, and public power infringe upon the citizen rights is often happened, the public power and civil rights contradiction are becoming more severely. In the existing political system framework, as the main social contradictions and dissolving mechanism-judicial system has serious shortcomings, and many people tend to use complaint channels to seek the right relief, which led to a surge in the number of complaint cases, but the letters and visits system could not be effective to cope with such situation, then "system crisis" appeared: Although the letters and visits system still play an important role in enhancing the relationship between the government and the masses, but the letters and visits system’shortcomings appear more clearly, many complaint cases could not be solved properly, and aroused stronger dissatisfaction in the masses, and even caused the group incidents. Because of the letters and visits system crisis stems from today’s political system, therefore, it is difficult to thoroughly solve the crisis if we only reform the system itself, speed up the reform of the political system is the fundamental way out of the crisis.The whole essay can be divided into six parts:The first chapter is an introduction, introduces the research background, research meaning, and the research space and methods.The second chapter is an overview of the government letters and visits system, mainly on the basic theory of the petition, including the definition of relevant concepts, the evolution of the functional design of the letter and visits system, and the classification of the cases. The third chapter mainly studies a similar system of the ancient and modern countries from the perspective of the political system, in order to provide useful lessons for the reform of China’s letters and visits system.The fourth chapter analyzes the relationship between political system and the letters and visits system, laid the foundation for the further analysis of the problems.The fifth chapter analyzes the current issues of the government letters and visits system under the environment of the political system, and reveals the problems within the system.The sixth chapter is a core part of the paper. Bases on the analysis of the previous chapters, this chapter analyzes the necessity of the letters and visits system under the current political system in China, the letters and visits system’s reform paths, and the prospective of the letters and visits system from the perspective of the political reform.Final conclusion:the political system is the soil of the letters and visits system, the fundamental way to solve the problems is to carry out political reform.