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Table of Content

    15 March 2025, Volume 41 Issue 2
    Governing Shrinking Cities: Political Logic, Functional Positioning, and Path Choice
    Ma Xuesong, Yang Xinyu
    2025, 41(2):  4-19. 
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    Motivated by institutional incentives and performance pressure, the governance of shrinking cities is a policy process and a resource reorganization activity. Local governments typically react to urban shrinkage by drawing on resources from superior governments and utilizing their own idle resources while applying multiple approaches to deconstruct and implement the tasks and objectives of the higher-level’s developmental and spatial planning. Shrinking city governance is driven by a compound effect of bureaucratic, interest-based, and reform logic. And it exhibits several procedural characteristics, including: a combination of macro-planning guidance and local policy experimentation; the interplay of resource allocation by administrative force and horizontal intergovernmental collaboration; and, the restructuring of administrative division scale and the streamlining of administrative agencies. Through analyzing relevant policy texts and practical forms, we can reasonably anticipate the functions of the governance of shrinking cities. They include promoting people-centred city construction, achieving the coordinated development of new urbanization’s spatial pattern, and constructing a balanced development order for a modern nation. The governance of shrinking cities should be based on an optimized planning mode that accumulates the potential for intensive and connotative spatial development. The goal should be the capacity for sustainable urban development that links internal and external resources, and consolidates the collaborative governing efficiency of pluralistic actors through centering on institutionalization.

    Institutional Innovation and Path Selection in China’s AI Legislation
    Yang Yanchao
    2025, 41(2):  20-37. 
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    The rapid rise of AI technologies like DeepSeek challenges modern legal systems’ values and rules. AI autonomy and decision-making disrupt our current legal foundations because they are based on human reason and morality, questioning justice, equality, and freedom. AI has also exceeded traditional rights and liability frameworks by introducing data and algorithmic rights while complicating legitimacy and responsibility allocation. China’s AI legislation must innovate by redefining legal subjects. AI should be treated as a tool with limited abstract subjectivity. Rights, duties, and responsibilities must be updated beyond the traditional static, fault-based models to suit AI’s dynamics. A dual-track “unified + sector-specific” legislative approach should address coordination, regulation, and global alignment. This will blend embedded innovation with independent oversight. Legislation should also balance innovation and risk through progressive laws and sandbox testing, ensuring adaptability and supporting AI’s healthy growth.

    An Innovative Path towards AI Governance: The Driving Forces, Challenges, and Prospects of China’s Technical Standards in the Age of AI
    Xu Jingting
    2025, 41(2):  38-51. 
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    The rapid development of artificial intelligence, particularly its accelerated social embeddedness, has demonstrated unprecedented innovation-driven momentum and profound transformative effects. At the same time, it has introduced the challenge of how to properly address AI governance’s “reflexivity” problem. Against this backdrop, traditional “hard law” has struggled to address new social issues such as algorithmic discrimination in AI governance. “Soft law” has filled the void as an alternative form of governance but has also provided a fresh opportunity for the unique effectiveness of technical standards in AI governance. In light of this, focusing on technical standards as a specific type of soft law regulation and striving for the high-quality development of China's technical standards—particularly by fully leveraging their soft law effectiveness in AI governance—has become especially important. To achieve this goal, it is crucial to recognize the advantages of technical standards. They have the ability to soften regulatory intensity, optimize regulatory actors, and shift regulatory intervention upstream. At the same time, it is necessary to grasp the driving forces of development, clarify practical challenges, and ultimately establish a constructive governance pathway.

    Platform Data and Algorithms: Associative Aggregation, Situational Conflict, and Complex Adaptive Governance
    Cai Xingshun, Jiang Guoyin
    2025, 41(2):  52-68. 
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    The associated application of data and algorithms in platforms induces many social and public issues. Thus, it is essential to explore the overarching governance logic and system to promote the standardized, healthy, and sustainable development of the platform economy. Drawing on resource-based views and complex systems theory, this research analyzes the connotation, sources of complexity, governance mechanisms, and system construction of digital resources as an aggregated system from multiple perspectives. It is also noted that complex adaptive governance represents a natural progression in managing the linkages between data and algorithms. This approach requires a synergistic evolution of digital resources through mechanisms of self-organization and other-organization. It integrates the logic of iterative “part-part” interactions, the emergence of the upward forces of the “part-whole”, and the control of the downward forces of the “whole-part”. As a result, this framework facilitates the construction of a multidimensional governance system encompassing “Wuli-Shili-Renli”, “power-market-norm”, and “organization-structure-function”.

    The Mechanism of Party-led Co-Governance: Exploring the Realization Forms of Grassroots Social Governance in Contemporary China
    Fang Lei, Lu Teng
    2025, 41(2):  69-82. 
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    Party leadership as an essential feature of grassroots social governance in contemporary China is reflected not only in the practical dimension of party building leading social governance, but also in the theoretical innovation of the party as the core of leadership at the level of the governance model. The concept of Party led co-governance, based on the idea of the “political party-state-society” relationship, is not only a descriptive generalisation of the grassroots social governance pattern of “one core and several subjects” under the party system, but also a theoretical explanation of how political parties can lead several subjects to realize social co-governance. Its constructive logic is rooted in the legitimacy logic of the Chinese Communist Party’s governance and the historical process of its leadership in social governance. In contrast to polycentric and hierarchical governance models, Party led co-governance presents its logic of applicability in the Chinese context in terms of authority distribution, decision-making mode, organizational structure, governance mechanisms, and value goals. Operationally, Party led co-governance is mainly carried out through the three mechanisms of political unity, organizational embeddedness, and social integration. This realizes the integrated leadership of governance authority, the interconnection of governance networks, and the collaborative governance of governance subjects in the grass-roots social arena.

    Theoretical Interpretation and Institutional Approach of the Organic Combination of Party Leadership, the United Front, and Consultative Democracy
    Zhang Zhen
    2025, 41(2):  83-96. 
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    Adhering to the organic combination of the Party's leadership, the united front, and consultative democracy is an inevitable requirement to giving full play to the advantages of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) system and to improving the effectiveness of national governance. They are also an effective path to developing democracy throughout the process, and an important guarantee to promoting the Chinese path to modernization and realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. From a historical perspective, adhering to the organic combination of the Party's leadership, the united front, and consultative democracy is advancing with the times and constantly developing and iterating. As the organic combination of the three is practiced in the CPPCC, it is also constantly expanding, extending, and deepening. From a theoretical perspective, the Party's leadership, the united front, and consultative democracy are three in one and mutually supportive. Party leadership is the guarantee, the united front is the method, and consultative democracy is the path. Their combination is a major creation of socialism with Chinese characteristics. From an institutional perspective, the important integration point of the Party's leadership system, the united front system, and consultative democracy system is the CPPCC system because it supports the organic integration of the three. Whether it is the historical dimension, theoretical dimension, or institutional dimension, it must be implemented in the specific practices that combine them. More solid empirical research is the theoretical growth point for further deepening the research on the “organic combination of the three.”

    Embeddedness and Integration: How Social Workers Promote the Construction of Community Governance in Hangzhou’s Xihu District
    Bao Guoxian, Liu Ying
    2025, 41(2):  97-109. 
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    Building a community governance community is an inevitable choice to address challenges such as complex interest relations and diversified risks. Given their unique advantages, social workers can be an important force in promoting the construction of community governance communities. Based on an analysis of governance practices in Hangzhou City’s Xihu District, this paper examines the construction of community governance communities through social workers. We found the action strategy driving this effort lies in building a comprehensive support and cultivation system, enabling them to promote the construction of interactive networks, as well as the infiltration of professionalism, the achievement of collective actions, and the optimization and reshaping of community governance structures through the step-by-step embedding of “relationships-structures-actions”. This process balances the social workers’ “embeddedness” and their professionalism. It also stimulates the participation awareness, internal potential and cooperative vitality of various governance subjects. This process has achieved the “integration” of value goals, governance resources, governance businesses, and subject relationships, so that community governance communities can be built up. This idea provides inspiration for promoting the formation of a “co-construction, co-sharing, and co-governance” pattern in communities.

    Community Governance, Political Trust, and Policy Compliance: Evidence from a List Experiment
    Yu Zeng, Zhiyuan Zhang, Jie Yan
    2025, 41(2):  110-122. 
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    Western democratic theory, empirically grounded in spontaneously formed and homogeneous communities, emphasizes the necessity of social capital for supervising public authority and ensuring effective grassroots governance. However, China’s urban community governance follows an administrative model, making social capital theory insufficient for fully evaluating its performance. This paper argues that Chinese-style community governance integrates both autonomous and administrative elements, making it capable of fostering public trust in local governments and translating community governance performance into broader government effectiveness. Using a list experiment based on a representative survey of Beijing residents, this study finds that high-quality community governance significantly increases residents’ compliance with public policies both within and beyond their communities. Importantly, this effect operates through political trust rather than social trust, highlighting a positive spillover effect from community governance. These findings offer critical insights into the effective grassroots implementation of national policies.

    Spatio-Temporal Evolution and the Driving Factors of Medical Service Supply Level—An Analysis of Zhejiang Province
    Qing Shangren
    2025, 41(2):  123-141. 
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    Enhancing regional medical services improves people's health and their economic and social development. This study examined panel data of the medical services supplied in 11 prefecture-level cities in Zhejiang Province from 2013 to 2022. The entropy weight method revealed the level of medical services in each city. The spatial and temporal evolution of medical services for each was also analyzed using the spatial autocorrelation method. Finally, a spatial econometric model was used to identify the factors driving service levels. The results show that the overall level medical services supplied in the Zhejiang Common Prosperity Demonstration Zone is on an upward trend, with large regional differences. The level of medical service supply has negative spatial autocorrelation, and the areas with high values of medical service supply do not play a radiation-led role. The level of urbanization and education expenditure has a positive impact on the level of medical service supply. Urban population density has a negative impact and negative externality, but the degree of openness to the outside world has a positive externality. The experience of medical service supply in the Common Prosperity Demonstration Zone shows that, in order to promote the improvement of medical services, the spatial allocation of medical resources should be optimised, and the areas with a higher level of medical service supply should play a spatial radiation-driven effect. At the same time, it is necessary to promote the process of urbanization and stress the importance of citizen health education and health literacy.

    Paradigmatic Adaptation in Tax Law Governance for the Digital Era
    Hou Zhuo, Wu Dongwei
    2025, 41(2):  142-157. 
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    The advent of the digital age has undermined the foundational assumptions of tax law governance. The failure to adequately identify the tax-bearing capacity of digital subjects through taxable objects reveals the explanatory deficiency of the homogeneous taxpayer assumption. The “core-periphery” structure inherent in digital economic networks has reshaped China's regional development patterns, diminishing the appropriateness of the regional homogeneity assumption while intensifying demands for localized, autonomous tax governance. The rise of the digital economy has also induced multidimensional complexity in social facts. This obstructs the translation of social realities to tax law facts, thereby challenging the assumed verifiability of social facts. Thus, the construction and implementation of tax law must incorporate subjective factors into the measurement of taxable capacity under the ability-to-pay principle; configure local tax authority according to the digital economy's geographic characteristics; and, establish flexible mechanisms to translate social facts to tax law facts based on bounded cognitive rationality. At the institutional level, critical reforms should include imposing enhanced tax obligations and cooperative duties on specific digital entities, appropriately decentralizing determination power over tax elements, and relaxing categorization methodologies. These adaptations constitute the essential institutional innovations necessary to respond to digital transformation.