Resident representatives raising the community’s most pressing concerns with deputies of the local People’s Congress at a “Neighborhood Consultation Meeting” in Nanhu Community, Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province Photo: IC PHOTO

---

In the context of modernity, social governance has evolved from a matter of technical administration into a broader concern encompassing human existence, value realization, and social relations. As such, humanistic concerns should constitute both a requirement and a defining feature of social governance. The reports of the 19th and 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China respectively proposed “establishing a social governance model based on collaboration, participation, and common interests” and “improving the social governance system based on collaboration, participation, and shared benefits.” These three dimensions—collaboration, participation, and shared benefits—embody the humanistic concerns at the heart of social governance, corresponding respectively to the restoration of human agency, procedural coordination, and inclusive outcomes. Together, they contribute to the holistic development of the individual. 

Collaboration: restoration of agency and institutional empowerment 

As the foundational dimension of social governance, collaboration essentially calls for reestablishing the central role of human agency in governance. Under traditional governance models, individuals were treated largely as passive subjects of management, with their needs reduced to variables in policy formulation. The dimension of collaboration, by contrast, requires recognizing individuals as active participants in social governance. 

Collaboration facilitates a threefold restoration of agency through institutional innovation. First, through legal empowerment, it grants citizens the right to substantive participation, establishing a universal participation mechanism grounded in civil rights. Second, through technological empowerment, it dismantles barriers to participation, establishing a resource allocation system that overcomes geographical limitations. Third, through cultural empowerment, it reconstructs individuals’ value identities, creating a new field for the accumulation of social capital. Along the dimension of collaboration, institutional empowerment—through a series of specific institutional arrangements and policy measures—endows people with the strength to transcend existing constraints, reform flawed institutional structures, and create equal development opportunities for all members of society. 

Participation: multistakeholder coordination and procedural justice 

As a paradigm of modern social governance, participation entails establishing a multidimensional system of checks and balances. It relies on multistakeholder coordination to ensure procedural justice in governance processes, thereby guarding against the alienation of power and the value distortions associated with single-actor dominance. 

Given the complexity of modern society, no single entity can address all governance challenges in isolation. The dimension of participation promotes the establishment of a multistakeholder coordination network integrating the government, the market, social organizations, and the public. Through functional complementarity, this network significantly enhances governance capacity and effectiveness. 

In this arrangement, the role of the government shifts from an “all-powerful enforcer” to a “rule-maker” and “resource coordinator.” The market optimizes resource allocation efficiency through competition and price signals, though its profit-driven nature must be moderated by public values. Social organizations, by virtue of their expertise and flexibility, help fill governance gaps left by government and market actors. Meanwhile, the public articulates its interests and exercises oversight through institutionalized mechanisms. 

While traditional governance relies on outcome-based legitimacy, such as economic growth and social stability, procedural justice is emerging as a new source of legitimacy in modern society. It demands that decision-making processes adhere to principles of transparency, inclusiveness, and responsiveness. Transparency safeguards the public’s right to know and allows for refining policies through social feedback. Inclusiveness ensures that diverse stakeholder perspectives are fully considered, helping to prevent the one-sidedness of elite decision-making. Responsiveness requires authorities to offer meaningful replies to public concerns and to translate public input into policy adjustments. Only through procedurally just governance can outcomes achieve broad social recognition and legitimacy. 

Shared benefits: universal equity and community awareness 

As the goal-oriented dimension of social governance, shared benefits focus on the equitable distribution of development outcomes through institutional design, while also cultivating a sense of community among members of society. This dimension rejects reducing fairness to the formalistic notion of “equal opportunity” and instead advocates for “substantive fairness,” demanding that public policies recognize disparities among members of society in terms of initial life circumstances, capabilities, and access to resources. 

Shared benefits are not limited to the redistribution of material resources; they also involve the consolidation of shared values and collective purpose. The formation of community awareness requires transcending narrow self-interest and cultivating a sense of belonging rooted in shared values. This identity stems both from trust in institutional fairness and from a broadly recognized consensus on collective goals. A further imperative of the shared benefits dimension is the practice of sustainability—upholding intergenerational justice by preserving the symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature, incorporating ecological costs into the logic of distributing development gains, and guiding society’s transition from a mere aggregation of interests to a community of shared future. 

Lin Yusheng is a research fellow at Shandong Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. 

Edited by WANG YOURAN