China awards local governments for innovation

The seventh session of Government Innovation Award given to local government agencies that have made innovations in social governances, was held today at the Beijing Meeting Center.

Launched in 2000 by the Central Compilation Bureau, Central Party School and Peking University, the award aims to encourage local governments to make more breakthroughs in social governance. It is a purely nongovernmental award, without any financial support from the State.

Yu Keping, vice director of the Central Compilation Bureau, who is also a distinguished scholar on social governance and author of the famous book, Democracy is a Good Thing, to his credit, said the awards group wanted to push multiple levels of governments to improve services to residents by honoring the excellent examples.

“Social governance in the modern age has always been a problem to all; we don’t think there is a final answer – we need constant innovations. We hope the various levels of governments will know how to better interact with the people, as well as promote the mutual trust of the people and the government,” he said in opening remarks of the ceremony.

The program has a very strict procedure in selecting the honorees. Every other year in March, their website for six months accepts applications from all over the nation. Experts invited from universities and research institutions as well as people with experiences will review the applications and select some candidate programs for on-the-spot investigations. Then a vote will be held based on the standards of innovative, real and beneficial; the final award list will be announced every two years in January after 10 days’ of publicity for comments and complaints.

In order to prevent cheating, the list of candidate programs is held confidential and the experts make their investigations without notifying local governments.

This year, from a total of 132 candidate programs, 10 have been selected for the “distinguished award.” These include programs that provide personal services to the disabled in Sichuan province; one that offers new multimedia channels for residents to file complaints to government agencies or staff in Antu county, Jilin province, and one that centers on democratic supervision of government finance in Jiaozuo, Henan province.

Most of these innovative programs follow the principle of “democracy, transparency, efficiency,” which are also the future trends of social governance.

For example, to prevent the possibility of corruption and misuse of public funds, the government of Jiaozuo, Henan province introduced a system that separated the power of government finance to different responsible persons, and put the whole process in transparency. It started in 2012 and the results have been satisfying.

Another honoree is the Sichuan Association of Disabled Persons, a State-sponsored agency. The association has cooperated since last year with the government to collect information on those who need help and offered personal services to them through the neighborhood. For the passing year, the general conditions of the several sample cities have been well improved.

Some of the innovative programs that won prizes are being followed by more local governments nationwide, said Xu Huan, a co-organizer of the activity. For example, deliberative democracy, which originated in Wenling, Zhejiang province, features general consultation of influential non-official figures in the government decision-making process. It has already been tested in many more provinces. Some of the honored programs have even been listed in the United Nations Internet Governance Forum.

To better suit changing situations, the program will readjust their awards since next session. I Hope we can make better contribution in the process towards good governance in China,” Yu said.