Political, legal authorities committed to modernization of social governance

"It took me only one visit to have my problem solved. With several authorities all looking into my case and people's mediators upholding justice for me, I feel so grateful," said Chen, a resident of Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province, at a local dispute mediation center after receiving the refund she claimed from a real estate development company.

With its staff coming from 19 local political and legal authorities like the commission for political and legal affairs and court, the center Chen visited is a comprehensive one-stop public legal service platform.

At present, there are 90 such centers across the province which collectively mediated 573,000 disputes during the first half of this year, 542,000 of which were settled, a success rate of up to 94.6 percent.

These centers epitomize the effort of political and legal authorities across China to give full play to mediation in order to settle disputes at their initial stage during the period of the country's 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development from (2016-2020).

Data show that Chinese courts mediated roughly 3 million cases before they entered legal proceedings in 2019, an increase of 66 percent from a year ago. Mediation enabled courts to save judicial resources by nipping in the bud a large number of disputes.

Provinces also actively promoted the Fengqiao experience, an effective dispute resolution mode, in rural areas with the aim of resolving as many disputes as possible at the grassroots level.

Improving urban social governance

Chinese political and legal authorities have been making persistent effort to modernize urban social governance since 2018.

By collecting billions of entries of data from its 64 government agencies and 10 counties and districts, Nantong in the eastern province of Jiangsu, for example, is capable of responding to any emergency as soon as it occurs.

Other provinces like Shandong and Yunnan also launched institutional reforms to enhance urban social governance.

Making social governance more intelligent

"Please let me in. I forgot to bring my entrance permit," a man told a community worker at the gate of a residential quarter of Dongying in Shandong province after being stopped by the worker one day in June.

The worker then looked up the man's travel history in an application program for social governance on her phone. Faced with the information presented by the program, the man admitted that he just returned from another province, and agreed to comply with the epidemic prevention requirements.

In recent years, provinces are actively exploring ways to make social governance more intelligent.

Zhejiang province, for example, applied advanced technologies including big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, making its management of medical materials and patients more precise.

With the help of the internet, Northeast China's Liaoning province greatly reduced the workload of community workers. Guangdong province, on the other hand, used big data technology to strengthen public security, shifting its focus from responding to incidents to issuing early warnings.

All these efforts have contributed to the Safe China campaign.