Reinforcing local governance has been a new focus of Chinese political reform. While the intellectual and institutional legacies of administrative law reform proposed by the central government have set tones of the overall reforms, local experimentalism constituted the main practice in the past years and is also being transformed into a new order of China‘s local politics. This panel will present the recent studies of these practices from empirical and comparative perspectives. It is the aims of the panel to present a picture of the contemporary practice in China‘s local governance, showing how Chinese government use transparency and participation to uphold and refine local governance and what are problems of these practices.