Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.8, 2018

 

The Public Sphere: The Foundation for the Study of Public Administration in China

(Abstract)

 

Xia Zhiqiang and Tan Yi

 

The crisis of legitimacy of public administration studies has a long history. Historically, our analysis of five approaches to the construction of public administration studies in the West has found that this crisis is rooted in the lack of a public orientation. Theoretically, the public dimension of public administration should be defined in terms of power, agents, recipients, methodology and values. In terms of practice, the unique nature of the public sphere in the construction of Chinese public administration is constituted by China’s unique public power framework, the influence of traditional political culture, and the terms laid down for the public nature of public administration by the particular stage of development China has reached. The discipline needs to be reconstructed with the public dimension as the basis of its legitimacy, with historical, theoretical and practical logic as its grounds, with adherence to the public sphere as its value guide, and with a framework of research subjects of a public nature, in order to construct a discourse system with a public character for Chinese public administration studies. This will ultimately develop into a research paradigm oriented towards the public dimension and will lay a firm foundation of legitimacy for the construction of public administration as a discipline.