China's Urban Community Governance Research

Communities and community governance theory are originated from theWestern countries. And it was not until the1990s that they gradually rosein China. Comparing with the Western countries, community governance theoryin China is not so perfect. Besides, although the community governance hasalready achieved some experience, it’s not mature enough. In2004, ourcountry put forward the requirement of “Constructing a Harmonious Society”and regarded it as the strategic goal of our society. Presently, our countryis in a period of transformation both in the economic and political system.As a basic unit of the society, community, just as the social cells, is nodoubt an important foundation to realize the society stability and harmony.In recent years, social differentiation is more and more obvious, andpeople’s civic awareness is gradually enhanced. Under such circumstances,the traditional community governance model has been unable to adapt to thesocial development. Thus, our local government needs to gradually separateitself from the center of responsibilities and rights. And throughcultivating community, to form a community governance model that isco-governed by the government and community organizations. This kind of newgovernance model, in fact, is a conversion from the administrativeintegration to multi-cooperation. The urban community governance in ourcountry should aims to stick to the multi-subject involvement model underthe lead of our government, persist in the sound interaction betweengovernment and non-government organizations, adhere to the people-oriented,construct harmonious community, improve residents’ consequence ofcommunity, and develop a nice atmosphere of community culture.In this paper, I choose the community governance in Chengdu as a caseto study because of the reason that Chengdu, as an important experimentalcity in the urban-rural development, has carried out a mechanism reform forcommunity governance in its self-governed community which varied in degreesfrom “returning power” to “endowing function” and then to “gettingback”. At the moment, the community governance in Chengdu has alreadyachieved its initial success, which is of great importance in theory andpractice to our community governance. This paper adopts governance theoryand new public management theory as its basic theory, with the help of the method of case analysis and comparison research, to analyze and generalizethe plights and development trends of the urban community governance in ourcountry.