Social Sciences in China

Vol. 40, No. 2, 2019

 

Experiential Logic in the Transformation of Contemporary China’s

Social Governance

(Abstract)

 

Li Youmei

 

How does Chinese society maintain its orderly operation and show stability and harmony to the utmost while China rapidly transforms its economic system and international circumstances become increasingly complicated? This is an important question that this essay tries to answer, and the analysis mainly involves the exploratory practice of the transformation of Chinese social governance. This exploratory practice is a process through which China constantly breaks through the traditional blockades of vested interests, overcomes newly formed challenges, and forms a new Chinese-style “one axis and multiple components” pattern of social governance during its rapid re-establishment of both social relationship structure and social psychology order on the unbalanced and insufficient conditions of development within its vast territory. During this process, the constant return to the CPC’s mass line, as well as the “mechanism of reversed transmission of pressure,” the “anticipation-led mechanism” and the “mechanism of turning crisis into opportunity” that the CPC has improved during its long-term revolutionary struggles and its deepening of reform and opening-up, has played an important part. The simplistic duplication of Western theoretical analytic paradigms cannot explain the experiential mechanism for the transformation of social governance, which is peculiar to China. The creation of research framework of “system and life” is just an effort for comparison and dialogues with Western classical theories. It is not only helpful for the development of sociology about Chinese transformation, but will provide new knowledge for worldwide social transformation.

 

Keywords: the transformation of social governance, progression mechanism, institutional superiority