On the morning of June 13, 2025, the lecture Technology Empowerment and Value Restructuring of Government Performance Management, a session of the Erudition Forum series of the School of Public Administration, South China University of Technology, was held in Room 107, Building No. 5. Professor Ma Liang from the School of Government, Peking University was invited to deliver a lecture on cutting-edge practices and research findings in government performance management for teachers and students of the school.
With the theme of Technology Empowerment and Value Restructuring of Government Performance Management, Professor Ma elaborated in depth on three parts: the old and new problems of government performance management, the theoretical perspective of digital transformation, and the value regression and governance innovation of government performance management, analyzing the dilemmas and development directions of government performance management practices.
Professor Ma first outlined the localized history of government performance management in China and analyzed the historical and cultural soil of the examination-oriented society rooted in China's performance management. He then raised a series of critical questions: Is performance management an assessment or a torture? What should be included in government performance assessment? How to achieve the transformation from single-indicator assessment to high-quality development evaluation? Why has the Good & Bad Rating system for government services been reduced to a praise game? Faced with the reverse information asymmetry between superiors and subordinates brought by informatization, where is government performance assessment heading? These questions condensed the old and new problems of China's current government performance management.
Subsequently, focusing on practical issues in government performance management, Professor Ma expounded the management thinking of information production, collection and utilization in performance assessment, summarized three systems of government performance management of Chinese government performance management. Finally, by distinguishing the concepts of digitalization and digital transformation and combining the embedding paths of big data and artificial intelligence technologies, he put forward countermeasures and suggestions for performance physical examination, aiming to realize unintrusive assessment, reduce interference caused by perceived evaluation, and overcome drawbacks such as new image projects in the digitalization process of government performance assessment.
At the end of the lecture, teachers and students of the school held in-depth discussions with Professor Ma on issues such as the digitalization of government performance assessment and public participation in performance assessment. Through Professor Ma's witty and vivid lecture, the participants systematically understood the development process and practical problems of government performance management and benefited a lot. This lecture also provided multi-dimensional inspiration for topic selection for students majoring in government performance research.
Speaker Profile:
Ma Liang is a Professor at the School of Government, Peking University. He has presided over major projects of the National Social Science Fund, youth projects, emergency projects and general projects of the National Natural Science Fund. He has published many monographs and translated works, and more than 100 academic papers in domestic and international journals, including dozens of papers in internationally authoritative journals in the field of public administration. Since 2022, he has been selected annually into the Global Top Scientists Ranking by Academic Impact and China Highly Cited Researchers list. He was selected into the list of the world's top 2% scientists in 2023 and 2024. His research interests include digital governance, government innovation and performance management.
