“The 70th Anniversary of the Founding of PRC, the Logic of National Governance System Reform” Report Meeting was held at Renmin University of China

On June 23, 2019, the conference on the report meeting of "The 70th Anniversary of the Founding of PRC, the Logic of National Governance System Reform" sponsored by the National Academy of Development and Strategy of Renmin University of China was held at the Yifu Conference Center of Renmin University of China. This conference summarizes the major contents of the reform of China's national governance system in the 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China through the report form.

Liu Yuanchun, Vice-President of Renmin University of China, Liu Xutao, Vice-Director of Public Administration Teaching and Research Department of the Central Party School (Chinese Academy of Governance), Zhang Anding, Deputy Secretary-General of the Chinese Administrative Society, Li Jianzhong, Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Personnel Sciences, Lin Jian, Director of the Center for Research on Social System Engineering, Wei Xin, Executive Editor of Journal of Beijing Administration Institute, Li Wenzhao, Deputy Editor of the Common Management and Policy Review and Deputy Director of the Capital Academy of Development and Strategy, attended the conference. Wang Conghu, the Research Fellow at NADS and Professor of the School of Public Administration, Renmin University of China, presided over the meeting.

Liu Yuanchun, Vice President of Renmin University of China, delivered the opening speech as the organizer. First of all, on behalf of Renmin University of China and the National Academy of Development and Strategy, he expressed sincere welcome and thanks to the experts, scholars and media journalists present at the meeting. At the same time, it is pointed out that 70 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China is an important historical node. Universities and national think tanks have carried out a lot of academic research and public reports on this theme and NADS RUC has also devoted itself to producing this annual governance report. Based on the objectives of the Third Plenary Session of the eighteenth Central Committee for the modernization of national governance system and governance capacity, highlighting the important position of national governance, from a historical perspective, this paper explores the logical laws of political ecology, officials' rectification and policy transmission mechanism during the period of national reform and adjustment, and provides historical evidence and ideas for the improvement of national governance system. Finally, he hopes that the experts and scholars participating in the conference will discuss and exchange ideas and collide with new sparks of ideas around the reform of the governance system during period of the 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Qi Fanhua, Director of the Center for Research on State Governance of NADS and Professor of the School of Public Administration of Renmin University of China, took the lead in presenting the keynote report on the theme of "70 years of Party and government institutional change: logic, law and performance". Institutional reform is a self-revolution and a profound change in state governance. The main report breaks through the limitation of the single perspective of traditional institutional reform research, examines the 70-year reform process of Party and government institutions as a whole. Using the theory of organizational life cycle creatively, this paper combs the reform of Party and government organizations in China, which can be divided into four stages: initial stage, collectivization stage, standardization stage and elaboration stage, and clarifies the content and characteristics of institutional reform in different stages. This paper sums up the changing rules of the evolution of Party and government organizations in three aspects: quantity change, internal driving force and path selection. The law of quantity change is that the number of the Party's institutions fluctuates upward and the number of government institutions fluctuates downward; the driving force of change is the optimization of the Party's leadership mechanism and the shaping of the government's management mechanism; the path choice is the establishment of the Party's decision-making organs and the reform of the government's functional departments. Finally, from the perspectives of economic development and administrative efficiency, the report tentatively judges the performance of the reform of Party and government institutions, and finds that the economic performance of the reform of Party and government institutions is excellent, which has effectively improved the administrative efficiency of the government in recent 10 years. In order to help construct the discourse system of Chinese-style state governance, we should take advantage of the wisdom of 70 years' institutional change from both practical and theoretical perspectives.

Xia Lu, Research Fellow at NADS and lecturer at the Department of Party History, School of Marxism, Renmin University of China, published a sub-report entitled "A Historical Survey of the Political Construction of the Communist Party of China in the Seventy Years since the Founding of PRC". It points out that the Party's political construction is a new conclusion put forward at the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and the Communist Party of China has carried out extensive and in-depth political construction in practice for a long time, and has accumulated rich experience. Specifically, political construction is promoted through three aspects, namely, the political direction at the macro level, the political system at the intermediate level and the political cognitive ability at the micro level. The author then combs in detail the practice of political construction in three periods: the initial stage of the founding of New China, the period of socialist transformation and socialist construction, the new period of reform and opening-up and modernization construction, and points out that the emphasis on the political construction of the Party since the Nineteenth National Congress is essentially the return and revival of the glorious tradition of the Communist Party of China and the organic unity of theoretical innovation and adherence to tradition, which is a tiger with wings added.

Participants in the conference held a heated discussion and expressed brilliant views. Several news media participated in and reported on the annual report conference.