[author]Pan Weijiang

[content]

Legal Governance of China’s Megacities

*Author Pan Weijiang

Professor, School of Law, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Member of Planning Committee, Institute of Chinese Law and Society, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Abstract: The old mode of government of Chinese city has three features: bureaucracy, city control through all kinds of social organization, and suppression mode of law. It means governance through de-complexity. As China is deeply integrated into the global production chain, Chinese cities are increasingly divided into two types: megacities, and medium or small sized cities. The challenge of China’s megacity governance simultaneously presents a trend of social individualization and functional differentiation. The increase in the possibility of individual choice and the amplification of its deviation effect not only bring innovation effects, but also lead to governance risks and hidden dangers of order. The governance of megacities in China must make a balance between security and Innovation. The new paradigm of legal government should respect the autonomy of the function system in the megacities and govern only through the structural couple between legal system and other function systems. The complex society should be governed through complex method.

Introduction

Since the reform and opening up, with the increasing number and rapid development of Chinese cities, the importance of urban governance in national governance has become increasingly prominent. In 1949 the proportion of China's urban population to the total population was 10.64%, and by 1979 the proportion of China's urban population was only 19.96%, and by the end of 2019, China's urban resident population had risen to 60.6%, and the urbanization rate exceeded 60% for the first time. This shows the tremendous change in the connotation of China's national governance over the past four decades of reform and opening up. If rural and peasant issues were the deserved protagonists of national governance more than four decades ago, then more than four decades later, the success or failure and future of national governance has become increasingly linked to issues of urban governance. This does not mean, of course, that issues of rural governance are therefore less important, but there is no doubt that a substantial increase in the importance of cities in national governance has indeed taken place.

In addition to the accelerated process of urbanization, the last two decades of urban development in China have been marked by an even more distinctive feature, namely the accelerated emergence of a number of mega-cities. China's mega-size nature has further amplified the speed and impact of mega-city development. In the foreseeable future, China may become the country with the largest number of mega-cities in the world. Unfortunately, the accelerated emergence of mega-cities has been accompanied by a lag in the theory of mega-city governance. While the issue of urban governance has received increasing attention, the governance of mega-cities has not received the attention it deserves, let alone the development of a basic theoretical model or analytical framework specifically designed to analyze the governance of China's mega-cities.

Considering the close relationship between law and modern governance, it is only right to observe and reflect on mega-city governance from the perspective of legal theory. From the perspective of legal history, there is an almost homologous relationship between law and urban life and urban governance. In Chinese jurisprudence's reflection and review of China's legal modernization movement, most scholars with a critical and reflective attitude tend to use the application and enforcement of the law in remote rural areas as an example to reflect on the shortcomings and deficiencies of China's legal modernization and localization. In contrast, although there are many problems and deficiencies in the role and functioning of law in the process of urban governance in China, researchers tend to be more inclined to discuss these problems on a case-by-case basis, and less inclined to elevate it to the height of modernization and construction of the national governance system and governance capacity for reflection. This has led to the blind spot of Chinese jurisprudence in the study of the rule of law in Chinese cities, and even more so to the neglect of the legal governance issues of China's mega cities, which makes theoretical research lag far behind the needs of reality.

The specificity of Chinese urban governance and its traditional cultural foundation

1.The complexity of urban governance

The basic analytical framework of urban research is the difference in spatial nature between cities and villages. Because of the difference in the spatial nature of the city and the countryside, the challenges faced by governing the city and the countryside, the problems that need to be solved, the way of thinking about governance, and the means and tools of governance used are correspondingly different. For example, unlike urban space, rural space has a very small population and is therefore a space for small-scale living communities. The economic basis of the rural space is agriculture, and farmers can satisfy almost all the needs of life through labor on the land, so the market is not developed, and at the same time, the mobility of the population is also very small. The rural community, tied together by blood and land, is essentially a homogenized community, and as such it is easy to form intimate relationships. Parker refers to these social relationships as "primary relationships": relationships formed through face-to-face interaction. In the communal living space of such a rural community, public affairs are rare, so a professionalized bureaucracy is neither necessary nor easy to develop. People rely more on traditions and customs to organize their lives, and social relations are more "personal" in nature. The inherent structure and mechanisms of such rural spaces are an important guarantee of law and order.

The issue of urban governance shows a more complex orientation. First, the economic prosperity and more colorful life in cities appeal to both the elite and the marginalized in rural societies. These are the people who have the greatest capacity to deviate from the established order and track of life. Second, the urban population is made up of one group of outsiders after another, all of whom are highly complex. As Mumford points out, the city is a huge container, and it is feared that the vast majority of the most idiosyncratic and uncanny people of any age live in the city and are accepted and collected by the city as a container. This naturally also poses a great challenge to the governance of the city. The traditional social controls that were spontaneously formed in the primary community are no longer effective, and individuals are increasingly "de-embedded" from the primary community, thus having more space and possibilities to make their own choices. As Burgess pointed out, the process of urbanization is a process of social disintegration and reorganization, like the metabolism of the human body.

Of course, these challenges of urban governance are, on the other hand, precisely the strengths and characteristics of cities. According to Weber, the city means, first of all, an area in which a large group of people live together intensively. In addition to dense populations, cities have the additional attribute of being "market colonies", i.e., they are embedded in a sufficiently large economic network and constitute the center and support of that network. In this respect, the importance and influence of the city lies not only in its internal spatial composition, but also in its radiance and coverage within the overall socio-economic network. These two elements of the city are closely connected and support each other, together shaping the nature and inner structure of the urban governance space, and forming an urban culture that is different from that of the countryside.

2. Characteristics of China's urban governance tradition

Differences in the natural attributes of the nature of urban/rural space form the basis of our study and understanding of urban governance. In addition, any study of cities must also consider the impact of differences in historical and cultural traditions on the spatial nature of cities, otherwise it is easy to form the superficial impression that "all cities are the same". In this regard, German urban sociologist Hassenpfluger's semiotic study of the differences in the spatial nature of Chinese and Western cities shows a profound insight. Through a semiotic approach, he saw the distinctive character of Chinese cities - in contrast to the open spaces of Western cities, the cuts and segregation of closed spaces constitute the obvious characteristics of Chinese cities. This, in turn, is closely related to China's tradition of urban bureaucratic governance. This constitutes the "code" of Chinese urban governance. In order to understand the characteristics of Chinese cities, it is necessary to understand the governance tradition of Chinese cities.

First of all, a basic definition of the concept of governance is needed. Governance theory is a hot issue at the forefront of political science, sociology and jurisprudence in China, and it is also a major theoretical and practical issue in the modernization and reform of the national governance system and governance capacity. On the question of what is governance, the theoretical and practical worlds are full of different opinions, and a variety of different statements have appeared. Generally speaking, the theoretical circles have been influenced by the "new governance" theories in the West since the 1990s, which focus on understanding governance from the perspectives of grassroots self-governance and good governance, and these studies emphasize the role of governance frameworks and governance mechanisms more than the traditional governance concepts focusing on "management". Compared with the traditional concept of governance, which focuses on "management", these studies emphasize the role of governance frameworks and governance mechanisms. In practice, however, the first time the concept of social governance appeared in an official party document was in the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on a Number of Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reform, adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee in 2013. In this document, on the one hand, the concept of governance does include the meaning of stimulating the vitality of social organizations, but it focuses more on the maintenance and safeguarding of social order, with the core content of preventing and resolving social contradictions and establishing and improving the public security system. Therefore, in practice, the so-called urban governance, local governance or social governance is mainly inherited from the tradition of "comprehensive social security management" or "comprehensive social management" since the reform and opening up, and its core meaning is, first of all, law and order, that is, combating crime, maintaining basic social security and stability, and maintaining social security and stability. Its core meaning is, firstly, law and order, that is to say, combating crime and maintaining the basic security and stability of society, and secondly, maintaining and positively guiding the social order on the basis of law and order. This includes not only combating individual deviation from social morality and conventional behavior, but also positively guiding individual behavior. From the perspective of jurisprudence, in addition to combating crime and maintaining law and order through criminal law and policy, this also means resolving disputes and maintaining social harmony and stability through legal means.

Chinese cities have a long history, and in the course of their long historical development, relatively stable modes and traditions of governance have gradually been formed and continue to this day, constituting the basic paradigm of contemporary Chinese urban governance. To select the main points, we might as well summarize them with three key words: rational bureaucratization, organization, and managerial law.

First, urban governance is characterized by rational bureaucracy. Rural space is a society of acquaintances, organized by family and blood ties. Except for a few public affairs such as building bridges and roads, the rural space does not need a specialized bureaucracy to deal with public affairs, and at the same time, the rural space is unable to provide professional bureaucracy with expertise and a stable economic base. On the contrary, the urban population is a group of strangers, which is suitable for bureaucratic rule. In contrast to the "direct democratic" administration of the rural community, urban governance is implemented through a professional bureaucracy. For Chinese cities in particular, administrative rule is itself the root cause of the emergence of many cities.

Secondly, it is difficult to control large numbers of unfamiliar people in a city, and the traditional means of governance has been to "re-organize" them, that is to say, to re-categorize them into artificial spaces that serve the function of compartmentalization and segregation. For example, the Li Fang system of the Sui and Tang dynasties. The so-called organization, in essence, is: "make people become members of the organization and make the organization of human behavior become the basic way of social action, so that the behavior of the society is more through the organization of human behavior and manifested. Individuals organize into collectives, and collectives, in turn, organize into societies, and it is in this process that man completes his socialization and develops certain rules, and thus a certain social order." Through the social organization to absorb the population, so as to form a kind of intermediary between the atomized individual and the state "community organization", such a kind of social governance ideas and practices, also widely existed in the western society, scholars generally summarized as "corporatism". Scholars generally summarize it as "corporatism". However, there is a substantial difference between this kind of organizing means and thinking in the Chinese urban governance tradition and Western corporatism: while Western corporatism focuses more on self-organization of the society and the realization of social autonomy through social forces, Chinese urban organizing emphasizes the search for "grass-roots agents of the state", which are "the agents of the state by bringing together dispersed subjects", and "the agents of the state by bringing together dispersed subjects". "the process of transferring the government's governance costs and risk responsibilities by unitizing and organizing dispersed subjects". As a result, it is actively constructed by the government and has a semi-government, semi-people identity, which Huang Zongzhi calls the "third sphere", which embodies the concept of "simple governance".

Legal governance is a combination of the first two features of urban governance. Throughout China's dynasties, not only have there been chapters in the legal code dedicated to urban governance, but there have also been many separate laws dedicated to urban governance. Of course, since traditional urban governance focuses on the control of public order and social behavior, law is mainly used as a tool and instrument. This contrasts sharply with the medieval urban autonomy laws of the West. Since modern law is based on the legitimacy of people's sovereignty and emphasizes the independence of courts and judges, two factors that do not exist in traditional urban legal governance, the modern concept of jurisprudence that is closer to and similar to traditional urban legal governance is in fact "regulation". China's traditional urban legal governance model embodies the obvious characteristic of "repressive law".

Contemporary Chinese urban legal governance still inherits and reflects the ancient tradition of Chinese urban governance. The result of such legal governance is an unequal dominant/dominated relationship between the governors and the governed, which often leads to the abuse of authority and dominant power by the governors. In the context of jurisprudence, this is often referred to as "abuse of discretion". This, of course, also includes the abuse of judicial discretion, which makes the law not only ineffective in resolving disputes, but also leads to a higher degree of social destabilization.

Of the three elements of traditional urban governance, the rational bureaucratic element reflects the nature of the difference between urban and rural governance spaces, while the organizational and managerial laws reflect the intrinsic connection between urban and rural governance. Chinese cities do not show a diametric opposition to the rural order, as Western cities do, but remain rooted in the base and bedrock of rural society, while both cities and villages are part of local governance, and thus governance focuses on policing. In order to maintain law and order in the city, as the main body of urban governance, the hierarchical system in the face of a variety of complexity in the urban governance space, the basic idea of governance, is to "de-complexity", or "simplify the complexity". Specifically embodied in the governance strategy, is through the "whole / part" of the schema, the urban space "re-village", so as to maximize the play of "face-to-face interaction space". Various micro-mechanisms are used to realize the "simplified governance" of the city, and at the same time, the authority of the "management law" is used to provide the ultimate guarantee for this simplified governance.

Challenges and Opportunities of the Rise of China's Mega-Cities

1. Challenges posed by the rise of mega-cities in China

Traditional Chinese cities are mainly administrative centers. The traditional Chinese urban governance experience was to control the movement and interaction of the urban population through the means of organizational and repressive laws to ensure the stability and security of the urban order. In recent times, although the traditional Chinese social order has been challenged by the capitalist world order, Chinese society has maintained its traditional structure for quite some time. Although a few open coastal cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou have formed a relatively modern urban order, they are still no more than enclaves and isolated islands in the whole Chinese society.

After the establishment of New China, due to the special international political and economic situation at that time, the door of opening to the outside world was closed, and a Soviet-style path of urbanization and industrialization was adopted. At that time, Chinese urban governance was basically a mixture of the Soviet planned economy system and the local traditional urban governance model. For example, after the founding of New China and before the reform and opening up, a number of new industrial cities rapidly emerged along with industrialization. Under the system of industrialization and planned economy, through the dual system of urban and rural areas based on the household registration system and the establishment of the unit system in cities, China took a unique path of urban governance. Due to the existence of the unit system, the governance of Chinese cities used to resemble or be close to many of the characteristics of the governance of small-scale communities in the countryside.

Since the reform and opening up, the development of the market has led to the gradual dismantling of the traditional urban unitary system. Nevertheless, a large number of Chinese cities are still essentially administrative centers. At the same time, a large number of the elite population in these cities still live mainly in various units such as administrative organizations and large state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This situation gradually changed and differentiated after China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. China has rapidly and deeply integrated into the world trade system, and has gradually become the "factory of the world" by relying on China's own scale advantages. This was also a period of significant change in China's overall urban development strategy. Prior to this period, China's urban development strategy was centered on the development of small and medium-sized towns. Since then, the center of gravity of China's urban development has gradually changed to supporting the development of large cities. When China occupied a pivotal position in the global industrial chain, a nationwide process of population mobility ensued, with large numbers of people flocking to key cities in economically developed regions, leading to the emergence of a number of mega-cities. In addition to the binary distinction between rural and urban areas, a new binary division has quietly formed, that is, the division between mega-cities and small and medium-sized cities.

As two different trends and types of China's current urban development, the two types of cities present many substantive differences, thus bringing further differentiation at the level of urban governance. For example, in small and medium-sized cities, administrative organizations and large state-owned enterprises remain the main means of absorbing the elite population. In contrast, large financial institutions, private enterprises, multinational corporations, and the most growth-oriented Internet high-tech companies tend to congregate in mega-cities, enjoying the advantages of mega-cities in various aspects such as politics, economy, finance, and culture, while merely branching out deeper into small and medium-sized cities. In the process of preventing and controlling the 2020 New Crown epidemic, we can also find the differentiation of epidemic prevention and control measures between mega-cities and small and medium-sized cities. In contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach of many small and medium-sized cities, which arbitrarily upgrades prevention and control measures, emerging mega-cities like Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, and Wuhan will pay more attention to how to strike an optimal balance between maximizing prevention and control and minimizing the damage to socio-economic life. This in itself is a reflection of the differentiation of social functions in mega-cities.

Almost all of the new mega-cities that have emerged in this phase are cities that are deeply involved in economic globalization and are closely related to China's status as the world's factory. As opposed to small and medium-sized cities, these mega-cities are in fact the economic hubs of a large region in the domestic periphery, while at the same time being embedded in the international economic system and playing an increasingly important role. As a result, industrial production in China's mega-cities no longer merely meets the daily needs of the local population in the vicinity, but rather maximizes profits, expands reproduction, and expands the boundaries and scope of the market in various ways until it penetrates into the global industrial chain. This means that the economic development and prosperity brought about by the scale of mega-cities is not confined to the city and its limited surroundings, but is aimed at the development and prosperity of the whole country.

A large number of large cities in between, depending on their objective position in the socio-economic development of the country as a whole, move in these two different directions: in the process, some cities shrink further into small and medium-sized cities, while others continue to grow into mega-cities.

Large numbers of foreigners continue to flock to these mega-cities. Their jobs are mainly absorbed through the private economy. On the one hand, this means the development of urban scale and the deepening of the level of marketization, and on the other hand, it also means that the fundamental role of the unitary system in the governance of China's mega-cities has been continuously weakened. One of the stark consequences of this is the growing importance and influence of people outside the institutional system in the intra/extra-institutional dichotomy of the mega-city population, thus posing a growing challenge to the traditional idea of integrated urban governance. Under the traditional unitary system, a large amount of resources are gathered within the system, and the lack of access to the system means the inability to share various scarce resources. However, in contemporary mega-cities, a large amount of resources are also gathered outside the system, and the resources outside the system are even more attractive than inside the system, thus attracting talents to move outside the system. Comparatively speaking, the population inside the system is more homogeneous and more dependent on the unit system in terms of access to resources and care for daily life, so the governance of the population inside the system still continues the logic and governance of the traditional unit system. On the other hand, the population outside the system is more heterogeneous, with greater individual independence and autonomy, and they rely more on the market to obtain resources for survival and to realize self-care in daily life. Unlike face-to-face interactions in rural societies, urban strangers interact with each other more indirectly through various intermediaries such as money, contract (law), art, and religion. This brings about a dramatic change in the way of governance.

Obviously, the space of Chinese mega-cities presents different governance characteristics relative to traditional cities. The trend of individualization of society is increasing, while the traditional idea of organized governance is failing. Many scholars therefore hope to respond to these new challenges through the "re-organization" of society. However, this approach is unrealistic. On the one hand, a return to the traditional unitary system is neither necessary nor possible, nor cost-effective.

Influenced by the French economist and politician Alain Lipitz, Hasenprugh defined modernization as a three-stage process: (1) Extensive industrialization (扩展工业化), which is characterized by manufacturing as the type of production, and whose residual production comes mainly from the input of extra labor time, and with which the industrial city corresponds; (2) Intensive industrialization ( intensive industrialization), characterized by large-scale intensive industry, its surplus production mainly comes from increased productivity, with the corresponding welfare city; (3) flexible industrialization (flexible industrialization), characterized by small-scale and flexible creative production as a type of production, its surplus production mainly comes from the integration of innovation and computer-based production, and its surplus production mainly comes from the integration of innovation and computer-based production, and its surplus production mainly comes from the integration of innovation and computer-based production. (3) flexible industrialization, which is characterized by small-scale and flexible creative production, with surplus production mainly coming from the combination of innovation and computer-based intelligence, corresponding to the creative city. In contrast to the ephemeral character of the three phases of Western urban development, contemporary urban development in China exhibits a co-temporal character: "We can observe a co-temporal model of development in which rough industrialization, fine industrialization and flexible industrialization are three in one." Nonetheless, Hassenprugh also acknowledges that the weight and importance of rough industrialization and fine industrialization are fading, while flexible industrialization is becoming increasingly important for China's future. The emergence of mega-cities is an important manifestation of this trend.

2.Innovation advantages of mega-cities

Many studies have revealed that mega-cities have significant advantages in terms of innovation. The size of the city and the density of its polycentric network, as well as the high quality and heterogeneity of its population, make it easier for people to reach out to each other and "tap into neighboring possibilities," and are therefore "extremely conducive to the generation, dissemination, and diffusion of good ideas. In this regard, West's team's research also revealed a surprising phenomenon: "If a city is nine times larger than another, then the creative energy of the city is not nine times higher, but 16 times higher; and if an international metropolis is 50 times the size of a small town, its creative energy is about 130 times that of the town. "

From the experience of urban governance, the conditions required for innovation run precisely counter to the traditional urban governance strategies of organized means of compartmentalization and repressive legal governance. The density of polycentric networks, as well as the heterogeneity of urban populations, require that individuals be given a wider space of free choice and possibilities of contact with each other. This is precisely what organizational segregation and repressive legal governance seek to prevent at all costs. Why, then, does giving individuals more space to choose and encouraging contact between heterogeneous individuals lead to innovation?

This is because the essence of innovation is in fact a deviation from the norm, and the benefits of innovation are the benefits of deviation from the norm, or more accurately, the advantage of innovation is the rapid amplification of the scaled benefits of deviation through a variety of high-density networking. And the first and foremost condition for any deviation or innovation is to empower individuals with greater choice space and choice possibilities. And this is precisely what the traditional policing model of urban management seeks to guard against and avoid. Because any deviation means a challenge to the established order and the release of new risks. This is why innovation is often described as "creative disruption". The larger the size of the urban population, the more heterogeneous it is, the more space and capacity for individualized choices it has, and the denser the networks, the more likely it is that more innovations/deviations will be brought together as a whole, and the more likely it is that they will be amplified into a scaling effect at a faster rate, thus creating an innovation advantage in the context of global competition. But at the same time, deviation does not always mean amplification of benefits, but at the same time it does mean amplification of risks, greater mobility, and greater order instability.

Indeed, in the governance of China's mega-cities, we have seen a variety of left-right diversions from the traditional means of urban governance: a variety of old tools of governance have failed, or the old tools of governance, while not failing, have brought about significant side effects, thus making the costs of governance overburdened. There is also a common situation that, in the face of new phenomena and problems, it is impossible to find timely and effective means of governance and governance measures to deal with the symptoms of the problem. For example, many mega-cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other mega-cities have repeatedly introduced stringent administrative measures to suppress housing prices, but the results often lead to housing prices in a shorter period of time to become higher. The problem of house price regulation is not essentially a matter of controlling the actions of a single individual. House prices in mega-cities are essentially a systemic consequence of the choices made by countless individual actors based on their own life situations, and the interaction of these choices. The essence of governance at this point is not a matter of governing and being governed by the city's governors and a certain individual, but the relationship between the governors and the city's real estate market is one of regulating and being regulated. This is essentially a problem of governance of a mega-complex system.

The effect of governance no longer depends only on the determination and strength of urban governors to implement repressive laws, but also on the "choices" (decisions) of countless individuals in society and the complex effects of their mutual transmission and influence. This is the biggest challenge facing the governance of China's mega-cities. The current chaos in the process of mega-city governance is but a variety of specific manifestations of this challenge. A new theory of mega-city governance must take into account both "choice" and "control".

Paradigm Renewal in the Legal Governance of China's Mega-Cities

1.Implications of Complexity Science

In the new urban order, the simplified idea of "de-complexity" is no longer the basic principle of urban governance. The governance of new mega-cities must turn to the complex governance of complex societies, and the emerging theory of complexity science in the 20th century has provided many important insights to this end.

While it is common to talk about the idea of society as a complex system, both Plato in ancient Greece and Descartes or Hobbes in modern times used a whole/local systems view to understand natural and social systems. Obviously, such a view of social systems is highly compatible with the traditional organizational mindset of urban governance - the key to governing complex systems as wholes is to break down the whole into parts and then divide and conquer. From an epistemological perspective, this is a reductionist view of systems - "If you understand the parts of the whole, and the 'mechanisms' that bring those parts together, you can understand the whole. "

The systems view of complexity by breaking down complex systems into localized parts, while once a brilliant achievement, is impotent in explaining many phenomena: climate change, complex social phenomena, and artificial intelligence, for example. As Michel, an expert in complexity theory research, points out - "Chaos, systems biology, evolutionary economics, and network theory all trump reductionism when it comes to explaining how complex behavior emerges from large-scale combinations of simple individuals."

According to Michel's summary, complex systems have two central features. The first characteristic is self-organization, which means that the regular behavior of complex systems is not controlled by internal and external controllers. For example, whether it is ants in an ant colony or neurons in the brain or immune cells in the immune system, they are not subject to any internal or external control and almost always act autonomously, both spontaneously and instinctively. But between a large number of these autonomous and simple actions end up producing extremely complex systems. The second characteristic is Emergent. Emergent is a direction of thinking that is completely opposite to reductionism, and refers to the fact that it is impossible to predict from the behavior of simple individuals the actions of an overall complex system made up of countless numbers of simple individuals connected together, let alone to understand the properties of the overall complex system. For example, in the case of an ant colony, "driven by genetic nature to search for food, to respond in simple ways to chemical signals released by other ants in the colony, to resist intruders, and so on. But, ...... while the behavior of a single ant is simple, the entire colony together constructs a structure that is amazingly complex." To take it a step further, the relationship between complex systems and their constituent elements should be such that it is not the basic elements that determine the nature of the complex system, but rather the complex system determines the nature of the basic elements. Based on these two properties of complex systems, we can define complex systems as systems with emergent and self-organizing behavior. If we use the vision and methodology of complex system science to observe and analyze the new phenomena and challenges presented by China's mega-scale urban governance, new ideas and methods will be generated.

An example is the issue of the sectionalization of urban governance. In the traditional picture of urban governance, the bureaucracy as the regulator exists as an omnipotent "super subject". In mega-cities, however, the tendency towards individualization of society deepens, so that the social complexity of mega-cities is incomparable to that of traditional cities. For example, traditionally, a city with a population of several hundred thousand is considered a large city, and if the population exceeds one million, it is a mega-city. However, in contemporary China, there are more than a dozen mega-cities with a population of about 10 million. At the same time, contemporary mega-cities are deeply embedded in the global industrial chain and emphasize innovation in science and technology, economy, education, culture and other dimensions, thus encouraging the occurrence and amplification of all kinds of deviations, which leads to an important consequence, that is, outside of the political system, there have been successive divisions of the economic system, the scientific system, the educational system, the art system and other various social spheres that have a relatively autonomous logic and operating rules. social fields. Although the existence of these social fields does not absolutely guarantee the occurrence of innovation, it is indeed an indispensable and very important condition for the occurrence and diffusion (amplification) of innovation (deviation).

For example, in the planned economy of the pre-reform and opening-up era, there was no economic system in which individuals were not permitted to sell or buy goods of their own free will, and the entire production and distribution of products was uniformly allocated in accordance with the will of the State. Since the reform and opening up, the control over individual economic behavior has been gradually relaxed, allowing individuals to produce, buy and sell various types of goods according to their own will, and the state has also facilitated these economic actions and choices of individuals through the construction of roads, railroads, airlines, the Internet and other media. And as more and more individuals are connected to the economic network through various transportation and communication networks, thus creating a national market and even connecting to the world market, these simple economic actions by simple individuals, relatively unfettered, eventually produce a massively complex and unpredictable market economy. Both economic systems and other modern complex giant systems operate according to their own internal standards and logic, and are not entirely controlled and determined by external regulators:

"Whether, and how much to provide to an individual is determined within the economic system. What legal claims an individual can assert, and how successful they will be, is a matter for the legal system. What can be seen as a work of art is decided in the artistic system, while the religious system sets the conditions whereby individuals can see themselves as religious. What comes to the individual as scientific knowledge, and in what form (e.g., in the form of a meme), these come out of the outlines and consequences in the scientific system."

In functionally differentiated societies, the bureaucracy as political regulator is not a godlike super-subject, but still can only make regulatory analyses and decisions within the boundaries of the political system, using the resources, conditions, and information available within the political system. The implementation of regulatory decisions can also only draw on the limited resources and procedures within the political system. For example, at the moment when the decision maker makes a decision, although the decision maker has already grasped a large amount of information, a large number of events have occurred at that moment, and the decision maker cannot directly perceive and grasp these simultaneous events and their potential impacts as if he were an all-knowing and all-powerful God.

Another example is the organization of urban governance. The rise of China's mega-cities is one of the most recent phases of China's overall socio-economic transformation since the Opium War. In this new phase, hundreds of millions of individuals have been "de-embedded" from village communities, family communities, and unit communities, and have gathered in various industries and trades in mega-cities, with more room for individual decision-making and choice, thus bringing more heterogeneity and diversity to mega-cities, which has led to the explosion of innovative capacity and economic growth in mega-cities. This has led to the explosion of innovation and economic prosperity in mega-cities, and at the same time has brought new challenges to mega-city governance.

From a sociological point of view, the problem of organizing is actually the problem of social inclusion and exclusion of individuals. The premise that makes organizational control of individuals possible is that the vast majority of an individual's existence and life is controlled within a particular organizational body. This means that the chances and quality of an individual's existence are fundamentally affected if he or she is excluded from the organizational body. Accordingly, societies achieve social integration through the mechanism of inclusion/exclusion. For example, in Aristotle, the loss of the city-state means the loss of humanity, and the individual is either elevated to a god or demoted to a beast. The expulsion of the individual from the community thus meant the harshest punishment for the individual. In the hierarchical societies of medieval Europe, on the other hand, individuals were categorized into different social classes, and those on the margins of social exclusion (e.g., the homeless such as beggars and vagabonds, as well as pirates, bandits, etc.) were viewed as the most unfortunate or evil people in the world.

Of course, inclusion/exclusion is not done as thoroughly in the city as it is in the countryside. Wanderers of all sorts, such as wandering monks and Taoist priests, students, frequently traveling merchants, foreigners doing business and traveling, etc., could not be completely excluded. Religious groups such as temples and churches, as well as professional unions, were mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion that emerged specifically for these wanderers. In sum, these mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in traditional urban societies are always related to the social status of the individual, which is itself achieved through the cutting and hierarchizing of social space.

With the emergence and differentiation of various modern complex mega-systems, such as politics, economy, law, religion, art, education, public media, etc., the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion in society has also undergone very important changes. In a functionally differentiated society, there is no single functional system that can contain all of an individual's life resources and life content. For example, a person can improve his ability and cultivation through various educational opportunities provided by the education system, satisfy various needs in daily life through various resources provided by the economic system, satisfy his aesthetic needs through various opportunities provided by the art system, settle disputes with others and organize his daily life through various services provided by the legal system, and satisfy various public services in daily life through various services provided by the political system. public services provided by the political system to fulfill the needs of various public services in daily life, and to obtain various information through public media. In other words, all of these modern functional subsystems include the individual within themselves, but none of them can "monopolize" the entire daily life of the individual. In other words, the individual must be able to participate in all of these communications, and to move freely between these different complex mega-systems in his or her daily life. At this point, who you are becomes less and less important. What matters is not where you occupy in the space of social categorization, but whether or not you have the ability to access the various communication opportunities offered by the different functional subsystems. The idea of governance through traditional organizational means to achieve control over individual choices and actions is thus largely ineffective.

2. Complex Systems Governance in China's Mega-Cities

To a large extent, the root cause of governance challenges in mega-cities is the individualization of order. The tendency to individualize society is not a new phenomenon unique to Chinese society, but a universal experience of modernity. As early as the 17th century, Hobbes used the concept of "state of nature" to express the possible impact of social individualization on social order, and in the 19th century, Maine used the proposition of "from identity to contract" to express the trend of continuous individualization of the whole society. The entire modern political philosophy and sociology of the West is based on a certain understanding and appreciation of the trend of social individualization. In the second half of the 20th century, with the emergence of the welfare state, the trend of social individualization was further strengthened. From a generative point of view, the individualized character of urban societies in the West and the East arose for different reasons, but the two are again at least similar in terms of structural and governance challenges. Therefore, the history, experience and lessons learned in terms of urban governance in the West are worthy of reference in this regard for the governance of China's mega-cities.

Individualization of society means an increase in the possibilities of individual free choice, which at the same time implies an increase in the possibilities of deviation. Deviation, in turn, is a source of innovation. Therefore, it is no longer feasible to organize governance in such a way as to limit and control individual choice possibilities by breaking down the whole into localities and then reorganizing the localities. If individual choices have to be respected and individual possibilities for deviation maximally tolerated, and even amplified and reinforced through various networks, then the governance of mega-cities has to find another way.

A society that respects innovation must face the reality of social individualization, and thus the question of how complex behaviors emerge from large-scale combinations of simple individuals. In other words, while the governance of complex systems does not necessarily lead to innovation, maximizing the possibilities of innovation requires respect for the autonomy of choice and freedom of action of individuals, as well as respect for the large complex networks that are formed as a result, because it is these complex networks that allow for initially small innovations (deviations) to be amplified and strengthened to the greatest extent possible, resulting in economies of scale. This means that not only does traditional organizational thinking fail, but it is also necessary to go beyond reductionist thinking and respect the emergent characteristics of complex systems, shifting the focus of governance from individual control through organization to the more abstract and macro-level observation, analysis, and study of the logic of complex system functioning.

The governance of complex social giant systems must respect the self-organizing characteristics of the system. The theory of functional differentiation is precisely a further clarification and clarification of the self-organizing characteristics of complex systems. Specifically, in modern functionally differentiated societies, the self-organization of social function subsystems can be further expressed as "operationally closed, cognitively open". The self-organization of the functional subsystems of modern society is ensured by the operational logic of binary codification. For example, the binary code of the legal system is lawfulness/unlawfulness, and all the internal operations of the legal system are centered on lawfulness/unlawfulness. This means that each social function subsystem carries out a particularized social function and is only good at solving a particular social problem. There is no substitution between different functional systems in terms of the functions they each perform. Strictly speaking, the legal system is only interested in matters of lawfulness/lawlessness, and all other matters, if they are to be brought to the attention of the legal system and dealt with by the legal system, must first be transformed into matters of lawfulness. For example, if the problem of environmental pollution is to be solved through the functioning of the economic system, then the problem of environmental pollution must first be transformed into a problem related to the binary code of the economic system before it can be solved through the economic system - for example, by transforming the problem of preventing and controlling environmental pollution into a problem of developing the environmental protection industry.

The functions of the various functional systems, while specialized, are mutually limiting and interdependent. For example, with the separation of the economic system, various conflicts of interest and inevitably increase, while enterprises also put forward more complex and diversified demand for talents. This means that the separation of the economic system places higher demands on the separation of the legal system and the education system. At the same time, the economic system tends to place higher demands on the stability of the political system. In this regard, with the deepening of functional differentiation, the relationships among the various functional subsystems, such as political, economic, legal, educational, and health, are independent of each other, as well as restrictive and dependent on each other.

It follows that if we use the theory of complex systems to observe the problems of China's mega-city governance, many new ideas and approaches can be developed. Specifically, the complex governance of complex mega-systems can be further materialized into the governance problem in the context of functional differentiation.

The concept of functional differentiation is indeed rather abstract, so let us take a simple example to illustrate it. Indoor thermostat as a system, only to the indoor temperature has "sensitivity", but also only accept the indoor temperature change "control", and through the release of cold air or hot air and in turn, the indoor temperature control. The thermostat system does not care about the humidity of the air in the room, the placement of objects in the room, the brightness of the light in the room, or the amount of noise in the room. Any change in these conditions is also unlikely to have any effect on the thermostat's regulation. Of course it is possible to interfere with the operation of the thermostat by unplugging the thermostat or simply smashing it. But this would be tantamount to canceling the thermostat, and thus forgoing the benefit that the thermostat provides: keeping the room temperature always at a pleasant level. The relationship between a modern functional subsystem and its environment can be viewed in much the same way. Luhmann refers to such boundaries between functional systems as the "intransparency" of modern functional systems. Although there are boundaries between the thermostat and its environment, the thermostat does set up some conditionalized channels through which, when these conditions are met, some mutual interaction and influence between the thermostat and the environment can indeed occur. In systemic jurisprudence, the concept of "structural coupling" is generally used to describe this "conditioning" and "channeling" relationship between factors outside the system and operations within the system.

In functionally differentiated societies, for different functional subsystems, such as the legal system, the economic system, the educational system, the artistic system, etc., the political system is just some other functional subsystem within their environment. This means that the political system also cannot

penetrate the boundaries between these functional subsystems and its environment, but can only be regulated through the conditionalized channels provided by structural coupling. Of course, the political system can also regulate these functional subsystems by unplugging them. But the consequences of doing so are very dangerous.

For modern functional systems, the logic of external domination must give way to the creation of internal mechanisms of self-control. In this regard, Toibner's constitutional theory of society is quite instructive. In Toibner's view, any functional system of modern society that expands itself without limits has negative external effects that infringe on human life and well-being. For example, the unlimited expansion of the power code of the political system may jeopardize human rights, the unlimited expansion of the economic system creates the problem of exploitation revealed by Marx, the unlimited self-expansion of the scientific system may lead to scandals like the "He Jiankui gene-edited babies incident," and so on. The solution is not the strengthening of external monitoring, but the establishment of internal control mechanisms in each system and the elevation of the core elements of these internal control mechanisms to the constitutional level.

Of course, external regulation is not entirely impossible. However, any external regulation must respect the relatively autonomous mechanisms and logic of the system's internal operation. In this regard, the regulation of the system is essentially the regulation of this "structural coupling" between the system and the environment. For such regulation, it is very important to understand the various "conditions" set up within the system for the production and processing of information. This is the fundamental reason why experts play such a critical and important role in modern societies. Of course, the political system, as the external environment of other functional subsystems of society, can regulate other functions by self-regulation, by changing the environment of other functional systems. Welker calls such regulation "contextualized regulation".

Compared to the traditional paradigm of urban governance, law can do more, but it can only do less, playing a more specialized function. The reason for saying that law can do more is that in the traditional urban governance paradigm, legal governance is basically equated with repressive law governance, and therefore law is understood to be primarily criminal in nature. However, in functionally differentiated societies, repressive criminal law is often a fallback, and it is in fact constitutional law, administrative law, and a variety of civil and commercial laws that play a governance role in the first place. On the one hand, as individualization of society is the core feature of the whole order in a functionally differentiated mega urban society, the safeguarding of the individual's freedom of choice and ability is of crucial significance to the order and prosperity of the whole mega functionally differentiated society. In this regard, ensuring the fundamental rights of the individual through constitutional fundamental rights is of particular significance to the functional differentiation of societies in mega-cities. Second, as has been pointed out repeatedly above, individual choice, especially the space and possibility of deviant choices, and once individuals have made certain deviant choices, the rapid amplification of these deviant choices through dense networks that create scale effects and benefits, are critical for innovation to occur. At this point, the various legal tools provided by various civil laws such as civil law, company law, securities law, etc., on the one hand, provide individuals with more opportunities and possibilities of choices, and at the same time, through the system of company system, stocks and securities, etc., make it possible to rapidly amplify and strengthen the innovation capacity released by these choices, thus bringing about the effect of innovation. It is hard to imagine that without these civil and commercial laws, so many private and technology companies since China's reform and opening up would have been able to grow rapidly into mega-companies, thus leading to the innovation and development of China's economy.

But conversely, we must also see that in the functionally differentiated societies of mega-cities, for the various functionally closed and cognitively open subsystems such as the economic system, the educational system, the public health system, and so on, the legal system is also their environment, and thus social governance through law is not a panacea, but rather a conditional one. The environment of a given system includes a wide range of choice possibilities and opportunities that can either bring benefits or lead to the creation of risks and unwanted consequences. The environment of a system thus consists of two parts, the environment common to all systems, and the environment that is relatively specific to a given system. For example, in the case of the thermostat, the whole of nature, including the room, is the general environment for all systems. However, in the case of a thermostat, other factors such as the light, sound, and color of the room are disregarded, and the temperature of the room, the electrical supply facilities, and so on constitute the environment that is specific to the thermostat. It is through this small environment chosen and constructed by itself that the thermostat senses changes in the external environment and responds in a regulatory manner. In systemic jurisprudence, such a small environment is generally referred to as the "internal environment" of the system. This reveals that if we want to regulate other complex systems in mega-cities through the legal system, the entry point is through the agitation of the internal environment of the legal system, so as to form the regulation of other systems through the self-regulation of the legal system. In contrast to the repressive character of traditional urban legal governance, Toibner characterizes such social regulation of law through self-regulation as reflexive law.

This shows the complexity and circuitous nature of legal governance in mega-cities. At the same time, we can also see that in this logical chain of perturbation-self-regulation-regulation, politics is not an instrumental relationship of domination and domination over law, but rather a relationship of mutual perturbation through the channel of conditionalization, i.e., structural coupling, between different functional systems.

The internal operation of the legal system is divided into the level of code and the level of program. For the functioning of the legal system, the level of operation of the legal/illegal binary code is the basic level, while the level of the outline is the complementary level. The functioning of the outline level primarily serves and complements the functioning of the code level, with a certain subsidiarity. The regulation of other functional subsystems by the law takes place primarily through the outline level. The essence of the outline is the standard of adjudication, and thus the regulation of other systems by the legal system is essentially realized through changes in the standard of judgment of legality in adjudication. For example, by examining and judging the legitimacy between private contracts, the legal system creates some kind of agonistic perturbation of the economic system, which in turn has an impact on the functioning of the economic system.

Such a governance through structural coupling is quite limited in its own scope of action. At the same time, as Luhmann points out, this interplay between the various functional systems is itself very complex, and therefore so are the specific effects, and therefore may not always achieve the intended effect of governance. In jurisprudence, this is reflected in the complexity of the "consideration of results" and "weighing interests" in judicial decisions. For example, interests can be divided into direct and indirect interests, as well as short-term and long-term interests, and also includes foreseeable and unforeseeable interests and other factors. Categorizing and weighing these different types and effects of interests is often beyond the capacity and competence of judges. Thus, the legal system's approach to mega-city governance is not primarily concerned with realizing or protecting a specific type of interest, but rather with providing all individuals in society with stable expectations of action through legitimacy judgments. From the level of individual action, this is actually to provide a set of dynamic and stable action framework for individual action. The core content of this set of action framework is the guarantee of the most basic and fundamental freedom of choice for individuals. Within the framework of action provided by the law, individuals in mega-cities form a set of self-governing order through self-selection and self-regulation. Such an order of self-governance is dynamic in the sense that it empowers and guarantees the individual's rights and possibilities of choice, and thus tolerates the possibility of deviation and innovation. At the same time, it is also orderly in that it draws some boundaries of legitimacy for choices, so that these choices and deviations take place within some kind of holistic framework order. Accordingly, the governance of functionally differentiated mega-cities achieves a balance between order and innovation.

Conclusion

Luhmann once explained the "paradigm shift": "When dominant differences can organize supertheories in such a way that the whole of information processing actually follows the dominant distinctions, they can acquire the qualities of a dominant paradigm." Evolutionary theory is a good example of a theoretical paradigm shift. Before evolutionary theory, the "origin" (creation) or a "superintelligent plan" was used to explain the "unity of differences" as a result of evolution. But since Darwin's theory of evolution, all this has been understood in terms of distinctions and differences of "variation/selection" (and later neo-Darwinian variation/selection/re-stabilization), which has brought about a change in the theoretical paradigm and the development of science as a whole.

The traditional urban governance paradigm is based on a whole/part systems view of society as a whole made up of people and equates social differentiation with social fragmentation. The emergence of China's mega-cities continues to challenge this. Social differentiation and difference do not necessarily lead to social fragmentation and disintegration, but are instead a source of innovation and vitality in modern societies. This has led to the replacement of the urban legal governance paradigm, i.e., a new urban governance paradigm that respects the boundaries of social functional differentiation, is guided by complexity thinking, and adopts the idea of contextualized governance, replacing the old compartmentalized, de-complexified, and re-villaged urban governance paradigm that is guided by the idea of re-complexity and the idea of re-villaging in concrete terms - i.e., the reflective law paradigm replaces the managerial law paradigm.

The rapid emergence and rapid development of China's mega-cities in the last 20 years or so has benefited from the historical conditions and opportunities of a specific period of time, both internationally and domestically, and at the same time has provided China's economic and social development with opportunities for further development and evolution. However, all opportunities are fleeting, or at least have a window of time. At present, the international environment is becoming more and more complex, and the domestic governance situation is facing many challenges, so what to do about China's mega-city governance will have a significant impact on China's future development. At present, this window still exists, and a variety of external environments and dynamic potential for China's mega-city governance model, especially the rule of law governance model of review and reflection, or more favorable. But this window will not last forever.