Research About Citizen Participation-oriented Urban Good Governance

Citizen participation is an important dimensionality of the democratic institutions.The roleof citizen participation in democratic governance is embodied in at least threeaspects——generation and supervision of public government, the operation process of publicdecision-making and development of citizens’ capacity for self-governance.The classic citizenparticipation refers to that citizens influence the government and its decision-making processthrough a variety of ways, including voting in the elections and their participation in publicpolicy. Under modern concept of good governance, citizen participation also includes a goodcooperation between the government and citizens, the former offering a maximum possibilityfor the realization of the public interest. Urban governance is the action and process duringwhich the director of the city works in accordance with certain laws, regulations and publicpolicy, and mobilizes all of the city’s resources and power to ameliorate the workingenvironment of the public, improve the quality of people’s life and realize the city’s normalrunning development. In a good city, the government takes the public interests as the core andprovide favorable service through citizens’ participation in political life of the whole city,ratherthan takes achievements that come from administrative means as its goal. During theadministration of the city in the recent years, the urban city Hangzhou has continuouslyinnovated the governance systems, mechanisms and methods, positively established a publicinterest and citizen interest-oriented system, and gradually reached a good governance roadwith Hangzhou characteristic.In this paper, with research methods like document analysis, case analysis, policy researchand systems research being used, researches are made on the basis of previous studies and onthe exploration to the practice and theory of citizen participation in recent years’ urbangovernance of Hangzhou, in order to more deeply find out the citizen participation system inurban governance, summarize the homologous methods, instrument, extent and mechanism,and more fully analyse the influence of citizen participation to democracy and the people’slivelihood in urban governance. With citizen participation being the main part,the urbangovernance of Hangzhou is the reflection of socialistic democratic politics construction withChinese characteristics and promotion of the building of a service-oriented government and it isalso a beneficial exploration to good government governance.The practice of Hangzhou hasshown that only establishing a sane citizen participation system and widely mobilizing thesocial forces to participate in urban governance, can make government, citizen and societyorganically unified, leading to a well governed government, satisfied people and harmonioussociety. Meanwhile, the practice of Hangzhou,especially its innovatively establishedcompositive subject---citizen participation system, can be largely duplicated and popularizedin the whole country. Citizen participation in urban governance shows the truth that citizens’full and effective participation in social political life is needed, but whether the citizens’ participation is successfull or not depends on a well developed civil society. Moreover, to buildsuch a society, relatively higher civil culture and civic literacy is required, which is preciselywhat need the government, citizens and society to work together.