"2010 Report on Public Governance in China's Provincial Capital Cities " news release conference, hosted by Unirule Institution of Economics, was held in Beijing in the afternoon of July 31, 2011. Dr. Feng Xingyuan, Vice President of Unirule chaired the conference. Professor Mao Yushi, Chairman of Unirule Institution of Economics, and Dr. Wu Yin, Vice President of Horizon Research Consultancy Group, attended and addressed the conference. Then, Professor Zhou Yean from Renmin University of China, and Song Houze from Unirule Institution of Economic Research introduced the theoretical framework and research findings of this project.

"2010 Report on Public Governance in China's Provincial Capital Cities"  summarizes all the research findings of the study of Public Governance by the Unirule Institute of Economics. This research is entirely based on first-handed data, which came from the household surveys jointly conducted by Unirule Institute of Economics and Horizon Research Consultancy Group in 2007, 2008 and 2010. The sample size of 2010 survey is 6,449.

Professor Mao Yushi said that the current social gap between rich and poor was easy to see; however, the main cause lies in the inequalities in rights and social classes. Nowadays, it is obvious that government is the most powerful organization in China, and it is very difficult for the public to monitoring the government. Thus, we decided to set up the program on public governance, to evaluate the performances of China local governments.

Professor Mao further pointed out that the evaluation of local governments' performance could serve three objectives. Firstly, it can help create a competitive environment among various provincial capital cities in respect to public governance. Currently, in China, the public oversight over government is very weak. Now the Chinese people have an independent and impartial organization that appraises the government's performance in public governance.  We objectively provide an information platform on which the public can see clearly how their city governments are serving the public and how they are doing compared with other cities. Such information will intangibly exert competitive pressure on the local governments. However, such pressure will not come into being in a short time; it requires years' accumulation of data. Secondly, the appraisal provides an additional source of information for cadre appraisal. The work performance of cadres is in urgent need of objective assessment, but the information within the official system is prone to distortion. This is because information is very easily distorted in the government system by the entangling of various interests. If the appraisal is to be done by an independent private research organization, the information will not be easily distorted. The objective and valid information provided by the private organization will be a valuable source of basic information for the government personnel and organizational departments of. Thirdly, the appraisal points out the direction for governance improvement, in which aspects governance is weak, and that more efforts should be made in the most needed places.