With the deepening of reform and opening up, the room for further reform in China is shrinking, vertical mobility in population structure slowing down and the conflicts of benefit sharing expanding. To deal with the impact of these instable factors, a stability-oriented system, with the politics and law system as the centerand institutions like th police, court, petition office and city administration as the coordinated support, was established with the joint efforts of the central government and local governments and has been enforced by governments at lower levels. The issue concerning spending on stability has aroused controversy on the internet. So a question might be raised: is this stability-oriented system sustainable?
The reason behind is actually simple. On the one hand, the governments have realized their failure in addressing some problems fairly and equitably, resulting in strong and active motivation to preserve stability; on the other hand, some mutual misunderstanding between the governments and civil society push the governments to take passive measures to uphold stability even though for the public benefit. These tasks of maintaining stability is related to local governments achievements, bringing about much waste of manpower and material resource in affairs like intercepting petitioners. This will have two results: suppression of petitions and answers to petitions. The former one could deepen social grievance, while the latter could trigger more petitions. Anyhow, the stability-oriented system is boosting itself so that the central government must pay for it constantly. The more it invests, the harder the tasks will become. Once the central government gives supports to local stability work, itwill have difficulties in clarifying its relations with local governments. As a result, local events will exert impact on public governance at large, among which the Chen Guangcheng event is a typical one that shouldn’t have taken place. Given all of that, we should break such a bad governance system that relies on preserving stability in order to establish a more reasonable, lawful and effective one.
