Civil Participation In Local Governance

Since1980s, the world has stepped into a stage of rapid development, and a new reform in local governance has gradually developed worldwide. From "rule" to "governance", the reform not only means a change of thoughts, methods, procedures, but also means that democracy has entered a new stage. The reform movement is driven and developed under the background of economic globalization, where each country has to face new international and domestic situations and confront much more complicated problems. The reform breaks the previous single-center management model by separating powers and authorizations, and guides citizens to participate in governance of public management properly. It enables local governments to enhance the responsiveness and the ability to withstand crisis. Therefore, the diversified management system plays a pivotal role in local governance.During this period of economic transition, a huge number of issues begin to disperse, including the differentiation of social structure, the diversified pattern of interests, complex social problems, the level of values differentiated power structure. With the global trend of local governance, China endeavors to adjust its particular conditions in order to make most use of it. Awareness of civil rights gradually regain consciousness, the value orientations of the different individuals and groups motivate them to participate in local governance actively. However, blind and disorderly non-institutionalized citizen participation not only brings many adverse impacts to local governance, and may lead to server damage to social security. This paper, taking Wukan for example, aims to highlight the strong willingness of citizens to participate in local government, and issues that brought about in the process of participation and tries to find out solutions for the issues.This article is divided into four parts:The first part is introduction, mainly takes about the background, purpose and meaning of the topic. It explains the existing researches and the main theoretical basis as well.The second part mainly presents the development of citizen participation in local governance in China, and different aspects of the supporting factors, system supply and features. The participation of citizen in local governance can be divided into two stages. The first stage is a traditional public management phase, when citizen participation was established and started to develop slowly. After the reform and opening up, there came the new era of governance, and citizen participation continues to expand, citizens began to take part in a wide range of the Government management and played an important role in the decision-making and governance activities. This paper analyses the reason and supporting factors for citizen participation in local governance from the aspects of the economic and political culture. Besides, it presents the four important systems channels for participation-people’s congress system, the petition system, hearing system, and grass-roots democracy and autonomy system. Moreover, it identifies four characteristics of citizen participation.The third part refers to the case of Wukan, and discusses problems summarized in Wukan incident and the causes behind it. The incident reflects the some problems including lack of supervision, no smooth channels for citizen participation, absence of government in citizen participation process. There are many reasons that contribute to it, such as lack of knowledge, the misconception of government officials and citizens, the complex social situation. The pressure made by different interest groups is another important cause. Furthermore, the level of participation is relative low. The last but not the least, political reform is hysteretic so that there is a defect in institution.The fourth part is to propose appropriate measures, including changing mindset, performing publicity and education, clearing the channels for participation, making up for institutional vulnerability, improving laws and regulations, strengthening legal protection, introducing of technology and strategy, developing new methods and new channels for citizen participation. Therefore, it will improve local governance, build win-win relationship between government and citizens, create a harmony atmosphere, and ultimately lead to good governance.