现代国家建设与中国财政预算体制改革——从国家-社会关系与权力配置的视角切入 (Modern State Building and Budgetary Institutional Reforms in China: From the Perspectives of State-Society Relation and Power-Distribution)

Abstract

Chinese Abstract: 本文在近现代历史脉络中理解20世纪90年代以来的财政预算体制改革所蕴藏的宪制意涵。孔飞力曾归纳出中国走向现代国家历程中的三个“根本性议程”：政治参与、政治竞争与政治控制，前两项重于限制国家的“专断性权力”，而后一项旨在提高国家的“基础性权力”。从清末到新中国初年，国家不断深入基层社会，财政汲取能力大为提升，但前两项议程进展有限。改革开放后，中国逐渐成为一个“准税收国家”，财政民主问责的诉求增强，因而改革的重心是国家去全能化、转变政府职能，并提高供应公共服务的基础性能力，从而建立一个权力制衡、功能分殊的宪制架构。然而，改革前的财政体制无法满足此双重维度的要求，故建立一个现代化的公共财政预算体制就成为政治改革的突破口。理性化（提高预算能力）和民主化（增强预算过程中的政治参与、协商和监督）是财政预算改革的两大隐线。前者进展较为顺利，后者依然道阻且长。通过具体的制度分析，得出根源在于：强国家/弱社会、强中央/弱地方、强行政主导/弱立法监督的权力分配局面，使得中央行政权主导的改革方难以获得突破原有格局的制度激励。

English Abstract: This article interprets the constitutional implication underlying the institutional budgetary reforms since the 1990s by putting them into the context of Chinese modern and contemporary history. Philip A. Kuhn once concluded that there are three “constitutional agendas” in China’s road towards a modern state: political participation, competition, and control. The first two intend to restrict the state’s “despotic power,” and the last one aims to improve its “infrastructural power.” From the last years of the Qing Dynasty to the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the state’s power continued to penetrate the society, which tremendously promoted its state capacity to extract fiscal resources, while the former two agendas merely had limited progress. After the launch of the Reform and Opening Policy, China has gradually become a quasi-tax state, and the social appeal for fiscal democratic accountability has dramatically increased. Therefore, the reform's emphasis is to de-totalize the state and shift the government’s function and improve the infrastructural capacity to provide public service, thereby creating a balanced and functionally differentiated constitutional structure. However, the old government finance system could not satisfy the double requirements, so building a modernized public budget institution has been the political reform's breakthrough point. Rationalization (improving the capacity to budget) and democratization (strengthening political participation, negotiation, and supervision in the budgetary process) is the two main threads in the institutional budget reform. The former is in good progress, while the latter’s effect is still far from satisfactory. Through detailed institutional analysis, the book contends that the fundamental cause is that the existing power-distribution situation of strong state/weak society, strong central/weak local, and strong administration/weak legislature has made the central administrative-dominated reformers hardly have institutional incentive to conduct power-redistribution in depth.

Note: Downloadable document is in Chinese.

Keywords: 现代国家建设;财政体制改革;预算法;国家-社会关系;权力配置;modern state-building; institutional reform of public finance; budget law; state-society relation; power distribution