From social management to social governance: Evolution, characteristics and innovation

The Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the CPC firstly required innovative social governance in 2013. This is the CPC’s focus on safeguarding the fundamental interests of the majority of the people, to maximize social harmony, and to enhance the vitality of social development. The differences between governance and management are embodied in such as the governance system, legality, resource management, and comprehensive measures, etc. Compared with the way of social management, in which the government was used to controlling and ordering all social affairs, social governance pays more attention to the process of co-operations among different parties, to more emphasis on parties’ co-operations and co-governance, with a continuous and interactive process of coordinated negotiations among multiple stakeholders. Social governance pays more emphasis on respect to social and political rights of members in the society, trying to stimulate the potential of social members, so that members of the community, in the process of social governance, have rights to speak, to choose and to influence; it pays more emphasis not only on maximizing autonomy of the social organizations and community, but also emphasizes the comprehensive use of a variety of means. The constructions of social governance system should mainly consist of four aspects: first, it is to improve the quality of social grassroots governance; second, it is to stimulate the vitality of social organizations; third, it tries to become an innovative and effective system to prevent and resolve social conflicts; fourth, it is to improve the public security system. To innovate the social management system, it is not only to achieve the transformation of the idea from control to service, but also to change the governance way from inflexible to flexible, thus, to finally form the social governance structure of Party leadership, government responsibility, social coordination,and public participation