Abstract: Special attention should be paid, to achieve the strategic goal of rural revitalization, to the problem of public service failure in suburban villages of mega-cities due to the inflow of migrants as there lies between them the institutional distance resulted from an unclear geographical boundary, coupled with gaps in system, resource and culture in their respective geographical spaces. A fine grasp of this distance provides a cognitive perspective for analyzing the mechanism and internal logic of such a failure. The government's “extending public services” and “Channeling the administrative power down to the community level”, the study reveals, are the institutional motivation of the lack of public services and the alienation of functions in suburban villages; the administrative allocation of land resources has weakened the economic foundation for the autonomous supply of public services; local governments' preference to economic development, urban development and household population, all render suburban villages blind areas of fiscal expenditure; village cultural community has led to the an attitude of exclusion towards intruding culture, interests and politics, reflecting the lack of cultural modernity and publicity in the villages. To cope with such a dilemma, the paper concludes, local governments should bring the migrants into the public service system, establish a shared mechanism of co-governance for migrants' participation in village community governance, and strengthen the construction of village culture so as to build up a shared village culture with openness, inclusiveness, diversity as the genes.

Key words: institutional distance, suburban villages in mega-cities, failure of public services, migrant population, integrated urban-rural development, rural revitalization