How and Where Government Spends Money: Public Budgeting Reform and Citizen Participation

Abstract

In this paper, the author discusses public budgeting reform based on the achievements and experiences of Shanghai’s Minhang. He began to engage in the study of public budget reform in 2005 when it remained a politically sensitive topic and received scant attention from academic circles. Public budget reform happily became a hot topic in the 2010 sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). This was not only due to the top-down reform from the central government, but more importantly, we should thank the scholars, media, and other social forces that had been pushing forward the reform concept. Since 2006, the Constitutionalism Research Institute at China University of Political Science and Law has been cooperating in depth with the China Law Center of Yale University on the “Public Budgeting Reform Program” and with the Fiscal Science Research Institute of the Ministry of Finance on research projects, and together they initiated the reform experiment in Shanghai’s Minhang District.

This paper is an abridged version of the speech given by Prof. Cai Dingjian at the Constitutionalism Lecture of China University of Political Science and Law on May 18, 2010. Parts of the paper were published in the 4th volume of Democracy and Science (2010).