To build a modern socialist country in all respects, we must, first and foremost, pursue high-quality development. High-quality development bears profound connotation and its realization conforms not only to the objective law of economic development, but also to the internal requirements of China’s economic development in the new stage, hence a must to achieve the goal. At present, with the foundation and conditions for high-quality development, we should implement the new development philosophy, build a new development pattern, and form a multi-party joint force in the transformation of development mode and power, as well as the improvement of governance efficiency, so as to ensure the steady improvement and reasonable growth of the economy.

The acceleration of the construction of digital government highlights the key role of digital technology in reshaping the form of government governance. Digital transformation has a differentiated impact on the decision-making power of different members of government organizations. Among them, street-level bureaucrats and officials working in institutions with weak digital application development capabilities are more likely to feel the sense of domination brought by the use of digital technology. In digital government, the separation between algorithmic decision-making and rigid implementation of government organizations is the latest manifestation of rational organizations in the digital era. In general, the construction of digital government is pushing the separation of decision-making and implementation within the government and that of managers and the managed, forming a trend of government organizational structure reform characterized by centralized decision-making power and administrative bureaucracy. This means that the construction of digital government may stir the revival of ideas such as technology governance and technology-based governance, while scholars need to examine the limits of technology governance and its unintended consequences in more detail. The trend of centralization of decision-making power and administrative bureaucracy in the construction of digital government has important implications for understanding government governance in the digital era.

Space governance has gradually become the focus of both theoretical and practice circles. The understanding and use of the term by different disciplines have enriched its connotation, however, the diversity of the concept is not conducive to academic dialogue and the development of knowledge. This paper aims to discover the core meaning of space governance, and to sort out the logical process of space theory as well as its implications for governance practice. The scholars have shown their discursive interpretations and scientific perceptions of space, thus providing epistemological foundations and methodological guidelines for understanding space. Space, thanks to the “spatial turn” in the social sciences, has not been confined to location, place or container, but falls into some kind of “metaphor”. Space, for governance, is not only a basis, but also an object, a strategy, and also a concept; the two bears a relationship of a multi-dimensional combination and multi-level interaction, i.e. “space shapes governance, and governance reconstructs space.” Land space planning, administrative division adjustment, community grid management and other practical forms reflect the interactive relationship between space and governance. The key word of space governance is the boundary of the combination of virtual and real, and its value goal is to achieve space justice.

The documents compiled by the State Commission Office of Public Sectors Reform and Charter of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) clearly stipulate that “CPPCC organizations should not be established in towns (townships).” However, recent years have witnessed rapid expansion of the CPPCC organizations at town (street)-level with no institutional resources such as institutions and staffing, financial budget, etc., a typical non-institutional expansion of bureaucratic organizations. Based on the dual dimensions (2×2 matrix) of authority and political order, this study selects Nanjing, Guangzhou, Loudi and Shunde as representative cases to systematically investigate the specific practices and typical characteristics of the establishment of the town (street) CPPCC organizations. The research finds that the expansion follows the triple logic, that is, the development logic of improving the performance of duties and the right to speak through the localized management and institutional sinking of the members, the legalization logic of gaining legitimacy through political discourse and Party committees (city and county level), and the absorption logic of drawing non-institutional resources. At present, here come the problems of representativeness, legitimacy and sustainability that need to be solved urgently. How to make innovative explanations in theory and break through existing limitations in practice determines the healthy development and future trend of the town (street) CPPCC organizations.

“Adaptation” is a typical characteristic of the implementation of primary-level governments. This paper, based on the internal mechanism of “adaptation”, puts forward the concept of “differentiated adaptation” and constructs the “situation-structure-behavior” analysis framework with an aim to analyze the comprehensive administrative law enforcement practice at the primary level. The study finds that in different situations, law enforcement personnel will carry out different interactive games with objects based on the organizational rules and governance resources, and the law enforcement as a whole shows the logic of differentiated adaptation. Specifically, law enforcement situations can be classified into three types: clear, vague and uncertain. Law enforcers will interact based on different situations and structures, and ultimately generate different types of enforcement: principled, compromise, and progressive. The comprehensive law enforcement is therefore a process of continuous adjustment based on the specific situation; there is a certain correspondence between the situation, structure and behavior, and corresponding types can be summarized—it provides a reasonable explanation framework for the primary-level law enforcement.

The load operation has hampered the efficiency of primary-level governance. The burden comes not only from the heavy task itself, but also from the unbalanced relationship between the blocks. As a unique inter-governmental relationship model born in China’s political practice, the strip-block relationship has brought a certain negative externality while playing its unique political function, and has become one of the structural factors affecting the improvement of primary-level governance efficiency. In primary-level governance, some higher authorities transmit tasks and pressures through vertical contract awarding, assessment and supervision. In order to find a balance between accountability risk and promotion incentive, some officials have adopted a formalistic response, which at length results in mechanical policy executors and adds burden. To promote the burden reduction, we should start not only start from reducing unnecessary workload, but also from empowering and improving efficiency, i.e. we should give more governance resources and action space to primary-level governments by clarifying the responsibilities of departments, clarifying the relationship between powers and responsibilities, and improving the assessment mechanism.

The core research issue for communication scholars in the era of intelligent media is how the media is related to people and society; “information cocoon”, the most representative, has shown significant differences in orientation in Chinese and Western studies. This paper, through the paradigm deconstruction of the “information cocoon” issue, makes a comprehensive comparison between China and the Western studies in terms of research methods, research core, research perspective, value orientation and academic position. By summarizing the characteristics of the paradigm of China’s “information cocoon” research and comparing it with the traditional western communication paradigm, it is found that the current Chinese research presents a “harmony paradigm”, that is, three localization paradigms namely macro-functionalism, rationality-criticism and humanity-technologism co-generate and produce a new paradigm. Finally, it points out the potential value of the three characteristics, namely integrated thinking, people-oriented concept and critical genes, of “harmony paradigm” in the studies of computing science, new new media and platform hegemony, hot topics in the era of intelligent media.

Political trust is related to political legitimacy and policy effectiveness. Based on the World Values Survey database, this paper makes an empirical test on the relationship between media contact and political trust. It is found that:1) Chinese political trust comes from both institutional performance and social culture, and both, through the media, are integrated into the occurrence mechanism of political trust; 2) newspapers and radio are conducive to maintaining political trust, while emerging media represented by the Internet may make the loss; 3) the erosion of emerging media has a crowding effect on the acculturation of traditional media. Different from previous studies, the paper finds that:1) the role of television tends to be negative on the whole; 2) national identity, political interest, subjective well-being and life satisfaction, as intermediary variables, constitute the intermediary mechanism of media contact affecting political trust. The cultivation of political trust in the Internet era requires the mass media to improve its credibility.

In modern society, a large number of production tasks are completed by people with collaboration. With collaboration, there will be individual performance and collective performance, and resource allocation based on performance identification will not only affect the organization, but also affect the fairness of society. Traditional performance recognition is based on measurement, while collective performance is regarded as the sum of all measurable individual performance. Due to the neglect of the immeasurable things in the cooperative relationship, this way actually leads to the unfair distribution inside and outside the organization. To promote the fairness of performance recognition and resource allocation, we need to distinguish different collaborative relationships. Among them, non-professional collaboration can be regarded as an investment relationship, and each collaboration relationship corresponds to a collaboration efficiency, so that individual performance and collective performance can be accurately calculated. There is a break between individual performance and collective performance in professional collaboration, that is, collective performance cannot be regarded as the sum of individual performance. In this relationship, we can consider the sum of measurable individual performance as half of the collective performance, and the unmeasurable performance as the common contribution of all collaborators, so as to calculate the individual performance of all collaborators. This will make the performance-based organization distribution more equitable, and will also promote fairness and justice at the social level.

With the advent of the era of public evaluation, citizens’ right to evaluation can be demonstrated. From the traditional government performance evaluation to the governance performance evaluation in the new era, the two-dimensional evaluation subjects of citizens and government need to be transformed simultaneously, so as to give full play to the role of governance performance evaluation in improving national governance performance. The two types of evaluation subjects are placed in the analysis framework constructed by the three-dimensional dimension of “field-value-role” to reveal the coping logic of different subjects: citizens and government need to adjust and change in the dimensions of governance (participation) field, value orientation and role positioning in time to meet the requirements and challenges of governance performance evaluation. At the same time, in evaluating governance performance we should also pay attention to the distortion of information technology to the governance field, to be vigilant against the erosion of public value by tool orientation, and to deal with the role tension caused by irrational evaluation behaviors, so as to promote the transformation of evaluative state.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Chinese political science scholars have taken the construction of China’s independent knowledge system of political science as the main line, vigorously promoted the construction of China’s political science discipline system, academic system and discourse system, and made remarkable achievements in all aspects of development: the local characteristics of the political science discipline system have become more prominent, and have actively responded to the requirements of China’s political development; the Chinese significance of the political science academic system is more magnificent, which effectively demonstrates the contribution of China’s political civilization; the Chinese voice of the political science discourse system is becoming stronger and stronger, which better matches China’s status as a major country. Facing the future, we should take the construction of the “three systems” as the starting point, base ourselves on China’s reality, attach importance to China’s experience, inherit Chinese genes, and comprehensively improve the autonomy of China’s political science knowledge system.

Critical research is a kind of normative research type based on self-reflection logic, and it is guided by enlightenment and liberation, and committed to transforming social reality. Critical research has three typical characteristics: critical orientation, action orientation and result orientation. Critical research is a very important but neglected research path in politics and public management. From the perspective of comparison, the independence and uniqueness of critical research as a research path highlight the value of its methodology. The scope of application of critical research is closely related to its research purpose and specific tasks. As far as the purpose is concerned, critical research aims to break through “false consciousness” and “false demand” through criticism and disclosure, so that people can realize their “true consciousness” and “real demand”, thus realizing individual enlightenment and liberation, transforming social reality, and gradually eliminating all kinds of oppression and distortion formed in the process of human social development. The design of critical research tries to, on the basis of experience, form new understanding through invention, discovery and interpretation, which further become new experience, and through such a non-stop cycle, it tries to break the false consciousness and liberate the whole consciousness. Most critical studies generally follow such processes or procedures: reviewing history, explaining history, designing, collecting, analyzing, concluding, and improving history. In addition to the construction, internal and external validity and other evaluation dimensions similar to general research, critical research also bears some other quality requirements based on its own philosophical assumptions, principles and the position of how to do research. As a research path in the sense of methodology or research paradigm, the development of critical research needs a relatively loose political and academic environment; it is necessary to strengthen the connection between theoretical research and social practice, pay attention to the gradual and limited social construction, and at the same time attach importance to the innovation and development of critical research methods to achieve diversification and standardization of methods.