Mega-cities in China (also called super-large cities, such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai) have been developing at increasingly high speed in the past 30-plus years and actively transform towards “global cities”, expecting to become node cities in the global city network. Due to large population, complicated rights and intensive social activities, security, order and civilized society are basic needs in the development of mega-cities. However, sustainable development of mega-cities is confronted with thorny problems. To relieve real-time environmental crisis and the great pressure of population on public resources, we must seriously learn, in the shortest time, the manner in which to effectively handle the relationship between the economic development model and environmental sustainability, and the relationship between control of population size and structural optimization. The solutions to these problems relies not only on accelerated upgrading of the industrial structure and level of technological innovation, but also on regulation of high-density low-cost urban living space. It’s imperative to transform the existing mega-city governance structure. Predictably, the scope of involvement of the transformation will be so wide and the degree of association so high that it will surpass our imagination, so there are no precedents for us to learn from.

I. Rapid Development of Mega-cities Giving Rise to Social Risks

Accelerated modernization and constant improvement of functions of mega-cities are not in sync with citizens’ sense of social security. Cities have both physical properties, including the built environment (like roads and buildings), and natural conditions and cultural properties consisting of people’s cognition of cities, sense of belonging, and the cultural trappings of urban civilization. Always under construction and constantly evolving, cities also have a life cycle. Changes of social structure, transformation of industrial structure and reproduction of cultural structure in cities cooperate and conflict, resulting in extraordinarily complicated changes and various phased risks in social development of cities. With expansion of the urban population and construction scale, various resources, markets and information concentrate in cities. As a result, cities are increasingly exposed to structural risks such as unbalanced social order and intensified population pressure on the environment, resources and public services. When cities are lacking in vitality and enter a relative decline phase, urban risks will systematically erupt. For instance, reduction in employment opportunities will increase social poverty; aging urban infrastructure will lead to the growth of public security problems and social conflicts.

Owing to advanced economic development and highly open society, risks in mega-cities are concentrated, flowing and superimposing. Compared with western mega-cities which have experienced a long history from pre-modern to modern and post-modern times, mega-cities in China have expanded for merely 30-plus years, and risks in the mega-cities also exhibit overlapped features of globalization and localization and features of different social stages. As the mega-cities accelerate their development towards “global cities”, various social risks connected with liquidity and openness will continue coming to the fore. As a report of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) points out, in the 21^st century, OECD countries will face severe emerging system risks. That is, the health system, traffic and transportation system, energy supply system, food and water supply system, and information and communication system upon which mankind depends for survival will all be threatened. The social risks and emerging system risks coming with globalization may also be transmitted or passed along in central cities of all countries first, achieving spatial accumulation. Due to staged and imbalanced economic and social development in China, traditional risks in different historical stages coexist in the same space and time as non-traditional risks. Such a complicated risk structure is so uncertain and destructive that it constitutes a major challenge to be taken seriously in the governance of mega-cities in China.

The Third Plenary Session of the 18^th Central Committee of the CPC has stated explicitly that we must improve the mode of social governance, stick to systematic governance and perfect the public security system, which provides important guidance and direction for risk governance in mega-cities. In its government work report early this year, Shanghai stated that urban security must be kept in mind at all times, and we must make every effort to transform the government-dominated administrative risk control system into a diversified and systematic risk governance system.

II. Solving Deep-seated Problems and Bottlenecks Is a Prerequisite for Building a Complex Social Risk Governance System

Transformation of mega-city social governance model is an arduous process faced with powerful inertia within the traditional governance model and difficulties impeding progressive urban governance philosophy. Solution to the problems relies not simply on the introduction of some governance technologies or new analysis concepts. It requires wholesome support of targeted scientific research and policy design. Cutting-edge studies on social governance in contemporary China have produced a slew of interpretive theories at general middle-view level. In order to understand and cope with the potential challenges confronting mega cities with complicated social risks in the construction of a complex governance structure, we will resort to these theories to discuss the following issues:

Firstly, positive interaction between governance and self adjustment of the society will encounter many deep-seated problems and bottlenecks. The 17^th and 18^th Central Committees of the CPC put forward new social management pattern and social management system. The new social management pattern features “Party committee leadership, government execution, nongovernmental support and public participation”. It not only specifies respective functions of and correlations between different entities, but also provides rules for handling vertical and horizontal relations in practical operations. Therefore, it’s essential to build a mechanism to coordinate those relations. The social management system features “Party committee leadership, government execution, nongovernmental support, public participation and legal guarantees”. All entities in management and governance of public affairs have their own ways of action. Their cooperation will have laws to abide by and be protected by law. The 3^rd and 4^th sessions of the 18^th Central Committees of the CPC successively stressed that, we shall innovate the social governance system and activate the strength of social organizations; we shall adhere to integrated construction of a law-based country, law-based government, and we shall make laws in a scientific way, enforce them strictly, administer justice impartially, and ensure that everyone abides by the law. The core issue in the reform of the social management system and innovation of the social governance system is to properly handle the relationship between government and society and the relationship between the market and society, and realize interconnection of top-down government governance and bottom-up social autonomy.

In the practice on social governance transformation over the past decade in mega-cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, positive interaction between governance and self-adjustment of the society is still faced with “administrative absorption of society.” (Kang Xiaoguang, Han Heng, 2007). The reason is that there is fundamental contradiction between the vertical command administration system and the horizontal consultative social self-adjustment system at middle-view level. The governance system built on the basis of a single center operates with a hierarchical bureaucrat management structure and a relatively closed command system, and it’s used to manipulating the society to evolve according to some preset picture of orders. On the contrary, the social self-adjustment mechanism is a multi-center open coordination mechanism, which forms unanimous orders based on multi-party consent across interest groups, parties and strata. Apparently, organizational conditions of the two are mutually exclusive. To link them, the government has to resist the impulse of administration to strengthen itself without limit and reject social participation, and has to save stable institutional space for self-adjustment of the society. However, with pursuit of short-term governance performance, because mega-cities are yet unformed and continue to rely heavily on the administrative mechanism, such a government guarantee mechanism faces difficulties to “jump-start” coordinated governance between government and the society.

Secondly, the pluralistic governance structure cannot assume the stable support of the public. In the practice of mega-city governance innovation, effective realization of “non-governmental support and public participation” requires not only compatible institutional arrangements but also the appropriate public consciousness and willingness to participate. Some studies show that institutional guarantees and incentive mechanisms alone are not enough to create pluralistic societal participation. For instance, promoted by relevant departments, various supervision committees, councils and informal meetings in urban communities were institutionally designed. The democratic participation system is quite sound, but residents have shown little enthusiasm towards participation. Many democratic systems are usually idling. Since the 11^th Five-year Plan came out, all places have increased input to promote rapid growth of non-governmental social organizations, but a lot of social organizations fail to actively participate in public management and services as they are supposed to. It seems that sharing rule is absent in the institutional construction promoted by the government, because social organizations have little consciousness of “shared rule”, and lack of public participation is a profound problem.

“Public”, as an academic concept, has a complicated theoretical origin and reference at different levels. As objective and orientation, “public” refers to common interests and values of people in a particular range of space. From the participants’ point of view, “the public” refers to people from the private sector who discuss and take actions on issues of common concern to realize transformation from individuals to citizens. From the perspective of participation process, “public” refers to openness and impartiality of processes, and that people reach consensus through dialogues on an equal footing. From the spiritual perspective, “public” refers to the spirit that individuals participate in public activities critically based on legal rationality to protect public interests and value orientation. “Public” is not only a social value in the modern society that arouses the public’s consciousness of participation and cultivates “fairness and justice”, and the basis for improving the society’s self coordination and management capabilities, but also an important mechanism of social solidarity of the age, so that it’s vital to positive inter-dependency between governmental and non-governmental sectors. In recent years, many non-profit organizations built on IT platforms arose in China. The open mobilization style of those organizations goes beyond the social mobilization logic of traditional diversity-orderly structure. It combines “participation”, “persuasion” and “diversity” and constitutes an attribute of “public” production. Such a phenomenon is also seen in the formation of corporate social responsibility. In other words, a pluralistic society management structure, if not built on the basis of “public” production, will be like water without source.

Therefore, social governance of mega-cities needs to go along with the growth of public control. However, the actual situation now is that there isn’t systematic institutional support for public participation in mega-city management, overuse of technical governance results in segmentation and fragmentation of public space, many fields of public participation lack transparent, scientific and widely-accepted rules, and stable public production faces structural dilemma, so the pluralistic governance structure lacks steady endogenous motivation.

Thirdly, the government organization model of isomorphic responsibility influences efficient collaboration within the government system. Why does the cross-department coordination mechanism in social governance of mega-cities always encounter tough challenge from within the system? Why is the current governance inflexible? These questions deeply touch the Chinese government’s internal organization mechanism of isomorphic responsibility. The so-called isomorphic responsibility means that governments at different levels are highly unified in vertical functions, responsibilities and institutional setting, and there isn’t a clear definition of responsibilities and rights for central and local government departments at all levels, while functional departments at each level try to restrict behaviors of functional departments immediately below them, so that cross-department coordination at each level may exceed this level and involve the upper government’s power system. For example, when the population management coordination organization of Shanghai tries to integrate statistics of public security, civil affairs and industry and information technology departments to build a big data platform for dynamic governance, it’ll face the problem of authorization by the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Public Affairs and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology at higher level, and cross-department integration becomes highly complicated. The example shows that in the government organization model of isomorphic responsibility, cross-department coordination at each administrative level is not a local problem but will involve overall institutional arrangements in the end. Besides, the organization model of isomorphic responsibility indirectly produces a rigid administrative execution system while greatly enhancing administrative execution efficiency of the government system. The execution system is not compatible to multiple models of authority, thus challenging the construction of a multi-governance structure in mega-cities.

The challenges mentioned above all point directly to some deep-seated problems with the social governance model of mega-cities. Therefore, the construction of systematic institutions is required, to support the transformation of mega-city social governance model at higher levels.

III. Practice and Innovation of System and Mechanism on Transformation of Mega-city Social Governance

How can we form the future social governance framework for Chinese mega-cities? It is, so to speak, impossible to answer the question in details based on theoretical deduction because complexity at practical level is far beyond general experience and imagination. The discussion below is based on progress in innovation of social management in the past few years.

Firstly: forming a multi-level interconnecting shared governance structure. The essence of reform is to incorporate multiple entities from government and society into a framework featuring consultative governance of horizontal orders, so as to better assimilate social opinions and satisfy appeals of various sides through negotiations. The attempt is likely to promote a new governance model with positive interaction between governance, self-adjustment of the society and resident autonomy at a deep level. In the past five years, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have all explored the construction of a shared governance structure at village and township levels. In the future, if a multi-level shared governance structure linked with the local shared governance structure is built at higher administrative levels (such as district and city levels), a new governance model is likely to be initiated. On one hand, self-adjustment of the society is given full play at each level of the shared governance structure. On the other hand, because there is a hierarchy of authority between different governance levels, the government can realize its top-down social integration through this channel. That is, the multi-level interconnected shared governance structure glues governance and self-adjustment of the society together in an institutionalized way. In fact, European countries exercising corporatism could offer a lot of good experiences in construction of such a multi-level composite shared governance structure.Secondly: promoting of the public nature of mega-cities through the rule of law. China has formed a national strategy for arousing social vitality and innovating social governance structure, which is an important guarantee for production of publicness. At policy level, however, there isn’t a clear route map for social reform yet. The wider community hasn’t got a clear understanding of the model and path of social participation and institutional space for social participation, which affects the stable production of a public nature. Therefore, the future can learn from the history if advancing economic reform to promote empowerment of the social sector by the public, through the rule of law in an orderly manner, and explore a modern multi-governance structure with Chinese characteristics at the top level. The production of this public nature can’t do without extensive and profound participation of social entities. The reason for insufficient social participation at present is that the participation mechanism is out of sync with allocation of public resources and lacks systematic support. Therefore, focus in the future shall be put on how to closely link the participation of social forces with the determination of public decisions and public expenditure, and the settlement of public problems through innovation of public policies, so as to arouse the enthusiasm of social entities towards participation in governance. Besides, we can borrow international experiences to introduce market mechanism and promote market entities to participate in social governance and social services based on corporate social responsibility.

Thirdly: optimizing the government power and responsibility disposition system of isomorphic responsibility. According to the principle of lowering the focus of management, we must scientifically sort out the power and responsibility system between different government levels, and compile power lists for governments at all levels with the trend of transformation of government functions, so as to explore a new mechanism of moderate decentralization in the vertical government system. Under this condition, we suggest relevant departments of the state further reform the government performance appraisal and assessment mechanism, and incorporate bottom-up appraisal and assessment by the public into the existing performance assessment system in a larger scale, so as to adjust government officials’ attitude towards political achievements and promote governments at all levels to strengthen mutual collaboration and cooperation from the perspective of “being answerable to the lower levels”.

References

Kang Xiaoguang, Han Heng (2007): Administrative Absorption of Society-Restudy on the Relationship of Nation and Society in Contemporary Chinese Mainland, Social Sciences in China (English Edition), 2^nd Issue, p.116-128.

Li Youmei (2012): Problems in the New Social Management Pattern of China-A Perspective Based on Middle-view Mechanism Analysis, Academic Monthly, 7^th Issue, p.13-20.

Li Youmei, Xiao Ying, Huang Xiaochun (2012), Public Dilemma and Breakthrough in Social Construction of Contemporary China, Social Sciences in China, 4^th Issue, p.125-139, p.207.

Lu Xiaochun, Li Youmei (2015): Arousing Social Vitality Requires Promoting Public Production, Wenhui Bao, Jan.18.

Qu Jingdong, Zhou Feizhou, Ying Xing (2009), From Overall Domination to Technical Governance-Sociological Analysis Based on 30-year Reform Experience of China, Social Sciences in China, 6^th Issue, p.104-127, p.207.

Zhu Guanglei, Zhang Zhihong (2005): Critique of Isomorphic Responsibility, Journal of Peking University (Humanities and Social Sciences), 1st Issue, p.101-112.

(Author: Li Youmei, Vice President of Shanghai Academy and Vice President of Shanghai University)