Improving the Capacity to Govern Based on Rules in China

摘要

The question of how to strengthen the implementation capacity of the Chinese government, or the ability to implement policies based on rules and regulations, was a central issue among both scholars and government officials when I ;worked for the National Academy of Governance in China in the 1990s. It was no surprise that, a decade later, it remained difficult to get people to follow rules during policy implementation in China, which inspired the publication of Shui-Yan Tang's book Ten Principles for a Rule-Ordered Society: Enhancing China's Governing Capacity. One major governance problem in China has been the substantial separation between the policy-making and implementation systems (Zhao and Peters 2009).