Around the world, public administration has been an extremely important discipline. In China, the discipline of public administration has been gradually popularized and is becoming increasingly important since its reform and opening-up to the outside world.

Among other sectors, the public sectors are dominant ones in China. The public sectors in China consist of government departments, Party departments, state-owned non-profit units, and government-led social associations. With a total of 105.3 million people, China has the largest public administration sector in terms of number and scope.

This area has been expanding even though governments at all levels appeal to downsize and streamline the number of employees in the public sectors. The public sectors hold the most powerful political and economic power in society and attract numerous social elites.

Owing to the special importance of the public sectors in the social and political life in China, research in public administration in China has been springing rapidly in recent years. Originally deriving from the disciplines of political science, economy, and sociology, public administration has already developed into an independent discipline. And with its increasing importance in status, public administration has become an influential and popular discipline in social sciences.

In more than a decade of its development process in China, we have witnessed many inspiring and exciting reform practices from which we can trace some positive trends.

First, public administration is becoming more and more professional. People working in public sectors have, in fact, become quite an independent professional estate. Government has put forward specific professional requirements for management people in public sectors, and has established corresponding standards covering human resource recruitment, performance evaluation and promotion. For example, all people who want to work in the government sector must take State-organized qualification examinations for civil servants.

Second, public administration has embarked onto the path of managing government according to the law. Governing by law has become an important goal of the Chinese government. In recent years, China has passed a series of important laws to manage public sectors such as Administrative Licence Law, Administrative Litigation Law, State Compensation Law and Law on Civil Servants. A legal system for public administration has been gradually taking shape.

Third, the areas of public service delivery have been expanded, and the quality of public service has been upgraded. In recent years, the Chinese government has set forth the goals of building service government and adopted a series of individual measures to improve public service quality, such as simplifying administrative approval procedure, administrative decentralization and one-stop service.

Fourth, the accountability of public sectors has been enhanced. The practices of "chief executive accountability system," "service delivery promise system" and "accountability investigation system" at various levels of governments are the specific indicators in building up an accountable government.

Fifth, efficiency of public administration has been greatly enhanced. Some local governments called the reform of improving efficiency as "efficiency revolution."

Sixth, transparency of public administration has been increased. The Chinese government regards the opening to the public of administrative affairs as an important task of reform. The central government has established a "national leadership task force for opening to the public administrative affairs" to promote transparency of the public administration. Some practices in recent years such as "opening to the public policies system," "information opening system," and "system of government spokesmen" are the important steps for enhancing the degree of transparency in public administration.

All these reforms and progress in the area of public administration reflect three trends in the changes of public administration in China: democratization, institutionalization and decentralization.

In spite of the positive changes in public administration in China, many serious problems still exist. The phenomena of corruption in public sectors are very common; quality of public service is comparatively poor; cost of public administration remains terribly high; efficiency of public administration is commonly low; functions of public administration are inappropriately divided, and demarcation between duty and responsibility is often not clear.

Compared to the problems existing in public administration, generally research in public administration is comparatively backward. It boasts little academic research, and the research methodologies used are either old or simply borrowing Western methods to analyze the society in China without in-depth research. In theoretical capacity building, there is more of an introduction of Western public administration theories and less theoretical abstraction according to the Chinese context in public administration.

In the area of application research, many policy suggestions are overly idealized without practical uses. Still, many subjects are worthy of study for public administration researchers study whether they are the experiences and patterns of public administration reform, or problems and lessons.

The author is a professor in political science, and director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovation, Peking University.

(China Daily May 8, 2006)