The idea that China should aim at building a service-oriented government is not a new one. The outbreak of the SARS epidemic in spring has turned up the heat on the topic again among the country's academic community. A Service-Oriented Government is a new model for our China to choose for the reform of our government itself. It is an inevitable choice to meet the development of the socialist market economy, the development of political democracy and the international wave of administrative reform.

To build the service-oriented government was the strategic plan addressed by the Party on the basis to increase the government ability on the service of society, economy and people.

What is service-oriented government?

Service-oriented government is guided by the concept of people first and assuming the power for the people to meet people’s demands of public services by upgrading services as the main function of government, modifying government structure, creating government mechanism, regulating government behaviors and increasing government efficiency. There are following characteristics of service-oriented government:

Public service is upgraded to be the key point among government functions. The type of government is generally identified by the government function. “Social management and public service” function should be intensified in service-oriented government. The construction of the service-oriented government is to make the public service become the main function of the government. Only by this way, can the construction of service-oriented government get the substantial improvement. If attracting investment and issuing more projects still took the advantage of providing public service, it would be hard to get the real effect of service-oriented government.

Public service department is a main department in the government structure. The type of government is often manifested through the main functions of government. To build the service-oriented government, the government structure should be adjusted to intensify government public service departments. Otherwise, no effect would be reached for this service-oriented government. To adjust the structure, firstly government economy departments should be further simplified and integrated to optimize the structure; and secondly public service departments should be enhanced to increase its service efficiency.

Public service expenditures are the key part among all the fiscal expenditures. To build the service-oriented government, the structure of expenditures should be adjusted and the public service part should be increased since both direct government provision of public services or governments of public services provided indirectly through outsourcing contract or purchase are paid by the government.

Besides the three points mentioned above, service-oriented government is the democratic government, responsible government, law-based government, and integrity government as well. Its performance mechanism must be ordered, opening, and efficient. All these characteristics should be carried forward to guarantee the improvement of service-oriented government.

We must build the administrative culture with Chinese socialist characteristics which mainly includes a people-oriented governmental service idea, citizen-oriented governmental behavior models and result-oriented governmental achievement evaluating models by discarding the traditional administrative culture, the administrative culture under the planned economic system and the chief western administrative culture. Understanding of a service-oriented government is always impossible without understanding of the government, public services and a Service-Oriented Government itself. The government is a tool to provide public services for the people and to satisfy the people’s interests, so it should certainly bear obligations to provide basic, quality services to the public. A Service-Oriented Government is a transparent and responsible government whose goal is to pursue democracy, and whose idea is to serve the people, and whose basic values are based on democracy. (