People's Livelihood Era Grass-roots Petition Work Reform Research

As a basic system to express the public opinion, letter petition plays an important role inknowing the people’s conditions, resolving contradiction, solving people’s trouble and providingreference information for government’s decision making in the government management ofChina. As the “safety valve” and “shock absorber” in the basic-level government management,the basic-level letter petition directly faces the complaints, directly deal with the letter petitionproblems, constituting the base of letter petition system of China and representing themainstream and current situation of letter petition work of China. Since the reform and openingto the outside world in the20thcentury, the adjustment of social and economic interest patternand conflict of interest relation have tended to be increasingly fierce, especially under the newsituation of building a well-off society in all-round way and making great efforts to guarantee thepeople’s livelihood, the basic-level letter petition work has faced an unprecedented examinationand is urgently to be perfected and developed.With the basic-level letter petition work as the entry point, based on the specific practice formicro analysis, by actively absorbing or learning from the successful experience, closely incombination with the public management theory and from the aspect of participant, we proposethe objective and direction of letter petition reform in the future. First, we briefly expound thebasic theory of basic-level letter petition work, including system, mechanism and responsibilitydivision of basic letter-petition work; then, with the letter petition work in Area H where theauthor is located, we conduct a on-the-spot research and mainly adopt the method of combiningdesigning, distributing and summarizing questionnaires with files and statistical analysis tomainly analyze the development course, work status and problems existing in the letter petitionwork of Area H, point out the common problems existing in the current basic-level letter petitionwork such as low efficiency, no responsibility implementation, blocked information,unreasonable setting and not strong participation, and in further combination with the letterpetition work in Area H, we analyze their specific performances. The problems are mainlyrepresented in five aspects, i.e. the comprehensive coordination function of basic letter petitiondepartment is not fully played, the basic-level contradiction is not resolved in place, emphasis onletter petition information work in the basic level is insufficient, basic-level letter petitionsupervision and urgency is not enough and the social participation in basic-level letter petition isnot strong. From the domestic and foreign views, we respectively elaborate the work concept,specific method and enlightenment of “centralizing letter petition work with mass work” in Yima,Henan,“joint petition receiving mode” in Shenhe District, Shenyang and make a comprehensive analysis and comparison of development experience of the same kind of system in Sweden,France, Australia and Japan. On this basis, we give priority to the introduction of “goodgovernance” theory in public management and point out that promoting basic-level letter petitionwork reform with “good governance” as the objective is the inevitable requirements to constructsocialist harmonious society, urgent requirements of the masses to participate in socialmanagement and the intrinsic requirements to improve the government management. Accordingto the basic characteristics of good governance and in combination with the actuality ofbasic-level letter petition work, we propose the reform concept of human-oriented letter petition,procedure justice, responsibility letter petition and efficiency letter petition in an innovative wayand further elaborate the three principles to promote basic-level letter petition work reform underthe leading of “good governance”, i.e. we must make it convenient for the masses to reflect theirappeals more effectively, must improve the efficiency to solve problems more effectively andmust improve the prevention from source more effectively. Finally, we give specificcountermeasures and suggestions to promote the basic-level letter petition work reform from fiveaspects, innovation comprehensive coordination mechanism, problem screening and solvingmechanism, information analysis, research and judgment mechanism, postmortem supervisionand urgency mechanism and social participation mechanism.