Research On Street System And Its Reform In Contemporary China

Sub-district offices are the nerve endings of the urban grassroots governance system.They are the main part in the operation of China’s urban power because they are connected with the municipal government,the district government and the urban society.Street system across the country has initiated extensive innovative reform practices,making the power structure and organization allocation of urban grass-roots management organizations become a hot issue again.Since the establishment of the street system,its nature,functions and institutional settings have been in a changing process.The system choice of street dwelling system is based on the requirements of political stability,social development and economic recovery.It is an institutional innovation in the field of urban management after the practice of "street government" mode,"district public office" mode and "street office" mode.Since its inception,the functional form and institutional nature of sub-district offices have undergone many changes,but their institutional capacity and organizational level have been continuously strengthened.With the disintegration of the unit system and the coming of the era of community construction,the street system has leaped from the "weak main line" of social management to the only carrier of urban grass-roots management.In this process,the functions and institutions of the street have further expanded and gradually evolved into the quasi-government at the urban grass-roots level.With the acceleration of urbanization and the emergence of a large number of social management problems,as well as the difficulties in the operation of the street system itself,street system has entered an era of change.Because of the differences in the choice of change paths,the urban grass-roots governance system shows rich local differences.In order to further explain the local differences of the street system,this paper divides it into four ideal types of urban grass-roots governance system from the perspective of the scope of government power and government functions.The four types are the following: weak power and small function,strong power but small function,big function but weak power,weak power and big function.Through collecting and analyzing the cases of the street system reform in the past 20 years,this paper finds that the street system reform is the adjustment of the power and function scope of the street.According to the practice of reform in different areas,we divide the reform into three types: quasi-government reform in streets represented by Beijing and Shanghai,remove streets office and establish community reform represented by Guiyang and Tongling,and functional adjustment reform represented by Chengdu and Wuhan.The comparative study shows that the quasi-government reform of streets strengthens the power and function scope of streets and forms a state-led urban grassroots governance structure.Although the remove streets office and establish community reform formally abolishes streets,the problem of "re-street" appears in the operation of new communities,resulting in the phenomenon of "change without change" in the reform.The function-adjusted reform aims at shaping pluralism.Governance pattern has achieved a lot in guiding society to participate in grass-roots governance,but there is a phenomenon of "too close bureaucracy".At present,the street system still plays an important role in urban management,public service and social stability in urban grass-roots governance in China,and there is no possible system to replace it.The practice of reform in various places shows that the street system in China is undergoing a transformation from economic function to public service function.Local differences in urban grassroots governance system in China are due to differences in economic development,types of residents’ needs and quantity as well as quality of social organizations.The key factors that determine the effect of the reform are the choice of objectives and strategies,the integration of resources in the process of the reform and the consensus of the reform.The reform of urban grassroots governance system should be based on local development reality,actively promote the transformation of grassroots management organizations,actively absorb the participation of multiple governance subjects,and promote urban grassroots governance to a higher level.