In recent years, such new technologies as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence have been widely used, especially in the fields of social governance and public services. An important way to strengthen and innovate social governance is to effectively utilize and integrate resources from various sectors and make social governance more systematic by virtue of modern scientific and technological means. The integration of technology and social governance has significantly improved social governance and public services in China. In the view of the interviewed scholars, we can not rely too much on technology in social governance, but adhere to the principle of putting people first, overcome the shortcomings of over-technical governance, construct the social nature of technological governance, highlight the subjectivity of social governance, and take the people’s needs as the focus and foothold of governance.

Innovative Technologies Enhance Social Governance

The wide application of new technologies in the field of social governance helps to promote the transformation in the thinking mode of social governance and improve the accuracy and efficiency of social governance.

Han Chuanfeng, director of Think Tank for Sustainable Development and New-Type Urbanization at Tongji University, said in an interview that

the development of modern information technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, blockchain and artificial intelligence, has provided a favorable technological boost for strengthening and innovating social governance in the new era.

Technological governance is a kind of practical innovation of the current social governance in the context of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Other interviewed scholars believe that technological governance plays an important role in social delicacy governance, community grid governance, big data governance, as well as in urban grassroots social governance mechanism, urban floating population management and other urban grass-roots social governance practices, reflecting the in-depth characteristics of grass-roots social governance operation mechanism.

Some scholars believe that by applying big data technology and other emerging technologies to urban governance and implementing coverage of all people, periods, factors and processes, urban governance can enter the era of delicacy management. In addition, big data technology has ushered in a new era of smart city, thus making citizens’ life more convenient and efficient.

Meanwhile, some scholars say that the emergence of technological governance is closely related to the rapid progress of modern information technology. Technological development can force reform of institutional mechanisms, optimize the relationship among government, market and society, and open up a new pattern of social governance.

Promote the Deep Integration of Technology and Social Governance

New technologies provide technical support for the innovation of social governance in China, improving the accuracy of social governance and the scientific level of decision-making, while the requirement “scientific, delicate and intelligentized” for social governance provides realistic impetus for promoting the deep integration of artificial intelligence and urban governance. However, it is also necessary to recognize limitations of the application of new technologies in social governance.

In the practical application of technological governance, there is sometimes an obvious phenomenon of governance deformation. According to Han,

researches showed that some local government departments fell into the extreme of coexistence of both excess and lack in management. The excessive application of technology has greatly increased the work content of some departments, while the public is almost unaware of this, that is, the effect and goal of technology application are “inverted”. The existing urban information infrastructure fails to effectively support the requirement for delicate and intelligentized urban management and social governance. Each department operates independently at different levels of perception, connectivity, data, computing, intelligence, etc. and lacks top-level design. As a result, it’s impossible to achieve the perception and connection ability of urban neurons as well as the ability of urban data aggregation and analysis.

Some scholars suggest that we should properly deal with the relationship between “technology” and “governance”, think about important issues concerning the boundary and mode of technology application, the goal of governance, etc., and pay attention to the security, law, ethics and other new issues that may be brought by new technologies. At present, the application of many technologies is still in its infancy and there are such weaknesses as lack in practical application, insufficiency in original innovation and data perception, and as well as poor institutional mechanisms.

Some scholars take urban governance under the condition of big data as an example, saying that technology has been a double-edged sword since ancient times, and the case is the same with the application of big data in urban governance. New technologies play a positive role in building an orderly urban society, but the privacy protection issues involved are also in urgent need for concern.

Maximizing Public Interest as the Goal

The basic value orientation of urban governance should be people-centered, and the people’s needs should be deemed as the focus and foothold of urban governance.

According to Han,

in fact, modern information technology has gone beyond the tool attribute of productivity and has the characteristics of both productivity and production relations. Technological governance should transcend technology and return to governance. Starting from solving the problems encountered by the people in their pursuit of a better life, it should break the administrative boundary between the manager and the managed as well as the work boundary between the public sector and the private sector, and establish multi-agent governance mechanisms that involve governments, enterprises, social organizations, and the grassroots level. In this process, technology is just a means to that end. Specifically, it is necessary to explore the reconstruction path of urban governance system suitable for China’s national conditions through innovative breakthrough and application demonstration of specific technologies, promote the realization of real-time collection, associative processing, intelligent analysis and dynamic decision-making of urban social governance information, promote the collaborative optimization of control flow, information flow, knowledge flow and value flow, form a unified governance pattern in both physical and cyber space, and thus improve urban social governance.

Governance without residents’ participation is not governance in real sense. In the view of other scholars, adhering to the basic value of putting people first and changing the excessive pursuit of instrumental rationality in technological governance are the basic premise for breaking through the limitations of technological governance in urban grass-roots society. This scholar believes that urban governance should return to the essence of “being people-centered and serving the citizens” after all.

A scholar told the reporter that urban governance should adhere to the systematic thinking under the holistic governance paradigm, take the maximization of public interests as the goal, utilize such modern information technologies as blockchain, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, reconstruct the organizational process of urban governance through institutional mechanism innovation, strengthen the service function of the government, and promote “cross-border” cooperation between public and private sectors, thus achieving the dynamic consistency of governance policy path and governance goal.