Synergistic Governance: New Direction O F Conflict Governance In China’s Land Acquisition

As the advancement of the urban-rural integration in China, the process of urbanization is accelerating, thus causing a huge demand for land. The government launches a nationwide land expropriation, which triggers enormous land-acquisition conflicts. This grim situation poses a thereat to the social harmony. Governments at all levels start to pay attention to the governance of the land-acquisition conflicts.However, although various measures have been taken, the results are far from satisfactory. This thesis attempts to explore a new direction to govern the issue of land-expropriation conflicts from the perspective of cooperative governance.Firstly, the paper discusses the theory of cooperative governance, and thinks that the cooperative governance is a social management model in which the diversified governing subjects equally and voluntarily conduct negotiations and dialogue, as well as mutually cooperate and work together to set rules. Secondly, the thesis introduces the overview of the land-acquisition conflicts, and believes that these conflicts have some properties such as complexity of causes, stabilization of subjects, economy and politics of content, unpredictability of consequences and so on. Besides, the paper thinks the ownership of land is complicated, and the definition of public interests is indistinct, as well as the procedures of land acquisition are unreasonable and the issues of compensation and settlement are severe. All these are attributed to the frequent conflicts of land expropriation. Thirdly, it analyzes the current situation of governance of land-acquisition conflicts in China and points out this governance in China is a pattern that takes the government as the main part, regards the administration as the primary measure, and sees the in-process control and post analysis as the crucial governance goal. But this kind of governance is passive and ineffective. On this basis, it is concluded that the ineffective governance is attributed to such reasons as the conflict of government’s multiple roles, the insufficient trust of peasant towards government, the lack of channels of peasant’s interest expression,and the shallowness of government’s concept of law-based administration. Finally,the paper explores a new direction of management in terms of cooperativegovernance and suggests that the government establish diversified governing subjects like farmer’s autonomous organization, rural non-governing elite, and neutral third party. In order to realize a balanced interest distribution, the government should strengthen the awareness of trust among the governing subjects and effectively supervise their behaviors to establish a relationship of subjects’ trust and consider it as a psychological basis of cooperative management. Besides, the government should build an effective communication mechanism and improve the legal system to provide a platform for cooperative management. The government should also advocate the cooperative spirit and implement the principle of democracy and rule by law for the soundness of cooperative governance.