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This article applies Q methodology to examine citizens' motivations to engage in Chinese city governance, more specifically to participate in the City Governance Committee in Nanjing. We identify three orientations underlying citizens' motivations to engage in coproduction: the optimistic believer, the active expresser, and the commissioned influencer. Our data show that expressive values, self-efficacy, and normative values are important reasons underlying Chinese citizens' engagement in coproduction. The orientations that we have found clearly differ from motivations that are reported in research conducted in a Western context. Our analysis suggests that governors should improve citizens' self-efficacy for coproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays various innovative technologies have been adopted by governments worldwide in resolving various complex and grand societal challenges. We have reported an in-depth case study, which has elaborated how a Chinese metro company has governed the risks of adopting an innovative technology, mobile payment. We have identified three primary risks involved in adopting mobile payment technology, namely promotion risk, integration risk, and organizational risk. For the governance of the risks involved, three different governance strategies were adopted by the metro company in Nanjing, namely, no response, control-oriented strategy, and toleration-oriented strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, we report on an in-depth case study of the ten-thousand-citizen review in Nanjing, an initiative to deal with the accountability deficit with which many Chinese governments have to cope. Nanjing Municipality invited citizens to evaluate officials' performance, and their reviews influenced the scores of officials' remunerations and even their careers. On the basis of theory, in this study, we develop a typology that is used to analyse how the introduction of this new horizontal practice of "letting citizens judge" influenced the existing accountability relations and how these relationships evolved over time. Our findings show that citizens' involvement initially resulted in a practice in which types of accountability were mixed and resulted in a situation of multiple accountabilities disorder. Only gradually were accountability characteristics aligned and the accountability deficit and overload reduced. This demonstrates the difficulties and challenges of introducing horizontal accountability arrangements in existing accountability systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]