Li Zhisong: Leading Smart City Construction with the People-Centered City Concept

The 2025 Central Urban Work Conference required the practice of the "People's City" concept and identified "striving to build convenient and efficient smart cities" as one of the key tasks, providing direction and a fundamental compliance framework for smart city construction now and in the period to come. Therefore, based on the current state of smart city construction, it is of great significance to analyze the dilemmas faced by their construction and development and to explore their developmental paths.

Smart City Construction and the Modernization of Governance Capacity

Since the 18th Party Congress, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has launched explorations into smart city construction. It has successively issued multiple documents to provide top-level design for the goals, institutional mechanisms, and key tasks of smart city construction, while conducting practical explorations in various cities. By applying advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to multiple aspects of urban governance—including spatial planning, social order, public transport facilities, and grassroots governance—it has, to a certain extent, promoted the modernization of the urban governance system and governance capacity.

From the perspective of policy guidance: In 2024, the National Development and Reform Commission, the National Data Administration, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Natural Resources jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Development of Smart Cities and Promoting the All-Domain Digital Transformation of Cities. This document set forth requirements for promoting urban digital transformation across all fields, directions, and processes, and specified construction goals to be achieved by 2027 and 2030, pointing the way forward for future smart city development. From the perspective of coverage: According to the 2022 Smart City White Paper: Relying on Smart Services to Co-create New Smart Cities, over 500 cities have launched pilot projects related to smart cities, information for people's benefit, and information consumption. Most prefecture-level cities and nearly half of county-level cities have commenced smart city construction, and smart city clusters (belts) such as the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta have begun to take shape. From the perspective of intelligent hardware: The digital renovation of infrastructure—including urban transportation, water, energy, environmental sanitation, and landscaping—is advancing deeply, and systems for terminal networking, ubiquitous sensing, and intelligent dispatching have been initially established. From the perspective of governance efficacy: Urban governance has truly formed a life-cycle governance mechanism characterized by "all-domain, all-weather, intelligent, and multi-channel" integration of prevention and control. Overall, smart city construction has achieved certain results in institutional mechanisms, coverage, technological innovation, and governance efficacy.

Smart City Construction Requires Systemic Linkage

The central government has repeatedly encouraged cities to explore and innovate smart governance models that serve the people by issuing policy documents and providing financial support. However, in practice, there is no shortage of cases where grassroots smart governance has failed. For example, some projects’ preliminary research was detached from the reality of the masses' lives. When higher-level governments hand down macro-construction goals to grassroots executive units, the grassroots departments must undertake core tasks such as surveying resident needs, project implementation, and system operation, thereby laying the foundation for building smart communities that align with urban characteristics. However, during the initial resident consultation phase, problems such as unscientific questionnaire design and insufficient or inadequate publicity and explanation occurred, making it difficult for residents to understand the core value and expected results of smart community construction, or to accurately express their objective needs and opinions. During the operation period, data was not updated in time and smart systems were not effectively maintained. This not only resulted in a failure to provide timely governance feedback to residents but also substantively hindered the collaborative governance efficacy between different community units.

The "Tiao-Kuai" ^[1] relationship model constrains the improvement of governance efficacy. As the basic model for relations between government departments at all levels in China, the Tiao-Kuai relationship has a profound impact on the advancement of the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity. The prominent "fragmentation of Tiao and Kuai" characteristic in the traditional administrative management model stands in sharp conflict with the systemic governance concept pursued by smart cities. On one hand, there is a gap between the technical governance goals formulated by central and local governments and the actual operational capacity of grassroots executive units. As the final destination of smart governance, grassroots departments bear the full-chain responsibility for resident needs research, project implementation, and system operations. However, these grassroots executive subjects lack the authority to independently select technical partners and are highly dependent on fiscal funds to maintain project operations. Consequently, in actual operation, construction efficiency and long-term project sustainability are often hindered by constraints on power and funding. On the other hand, significant data barriers and jurisdictional divisions exist between different government departments. Smart city governance requires the comprehensive sharing of data and deep integration of systems. If departments construct their own "data silos" based on the boundaries of their legal duties, smart governance will struggle to achieve cross-departmental and cross-hierarchical collaboration, thereby reducing efficiency. Traditional urban governance is affected by administrative barriers and departmental boundaries, causing a decentralization of the governance structure; this is an institutional obstacle to constructing an "all-domain collaborative" governance paradigm for smart cities.

The Development Path of Smart City Construction

First, practicing the People's City concept. To resolve the structural deviation between smart city construction and the people's needs, governments at all levels and grassroots governance subjects must deeply practice the People's City concept, integrating the "people-centered" logic ^[2] throughout the entire cycle and all fields of governance. The People's City concept is a collection of valuable experiences summarized during long-term urban work by the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core since the 18th Party Congress, upholding Marxist theoretical guidance and the purpose of serving the people whole-heartedly. The core connotation of this concept is "the people's city is built by the people, and the people's city is for the people." It emphasizes both the subject status of the people in urban construction and governance and that the people are the value destination of urban work. Smart cities need to rely on the people to create material, spiritual, and institutional civilizations. Cities exist because of people, and the ultimate purpose of their development should serve the well-rounded development of the person. The long-standing phenomenon in smart city governance—where the real opinions and feelings of residents are not seriously researched, and mechanisms to conveniently and efficiently absorb public opinion, concentrate public wisdom, and share development results with the people are not established—is not only due to institutional mechanisms and public awareness of participation but also related to a lack of guidance from scientific governance concepts. The lack of guidance from scientific governance concepts causes smart city governance to use objective data reflecting urban development (such as GDP) as the sole performance evaluation standard, ultimately neglecting the value orientation that technology serves people and urban development serves people. In the future, the theoretical origins and practical value of the People's City concept can be deeply excavated to guide smart city construction with new governance concepts.

Second, constructing a multi-element collaborative governance mechanism. To break through the institutional obstacles of "Tiao-Kuai fragmentation" to systemic governance, a combined strategy of vertical restructuring of powers and responsibilities, horizontal data integration, and empowerment of social subjects is needed to achieve a paradigm shift from traditional administrative-led governance to multi-party co-governance. (1) Construct a unified and efficient institutional system. Vertically, clarify an upper-and-lower linkage management structure, strengthen the coordinating role of local governments in urban governance, support the grassroots in exploring governance models based on reality, and guarantee the rights of residents to participate in urban governance. (2) Provide grassroots units with the necessary funding and talent support for smart governance exploration and long-term operations. Horizontally, deepen the reform of government department collaboration mechanisms. Focus on breaking down data barriers between departments and establish a list system for basic data sharing. Aimed at the difficulties of whole-cycle governance in urban planning, construction, and management, revise departmental collaboration norms and clarify the attribution of powers and responsibilities. (3) Improve the system for whole-process public participation. Establish two-way empowerment channels through smart platforms to ensure residents’ rights to participate in setting governance goals, supervising the entire governance process, and evaluating governance effects, thus promoting a true transformation from being "objects of governance" to "subjects of governance."

(The author is the Vice Dean and Associate Professor of the School of Marxism, Northwest University) Source: Guangming Daily (China Social Sciences Today) (October 10, 2025) Web Editor: Huihui