ABSTRACT
Introduction Since opening up in the 1980s, China has encountered fundamental challenges in governance. Those challenges are becoming even more pressing as the country attempts to streamline the relationship between the government and the market while maintaining a semi-authoritarian, one-party system and transforming the role of government by making it more law based and service oriented. China’s need to consider how it should govern itself while addressing these challenges has been emphasised by a number of transformations in contemporary China, especially urban China.
