Farmers’ petitions give a concentrated expression to various conflicts in rural areas, posing a great challenge to some local governments.

Globalization is not a one-fold economic process but involves rich political implications as well.Globalization has brought complicated influencing factors to China’s grassroots democratic politics.

The development of China’s grassroots democracy results from social transition and change in institutional structure brought about by reform and opening-up.

With regard to social stability mechanism, petition system should be examined from the following aspects. First, can the fundamental community-level conflicts be resolved through petitions?

By examining the goals and process of county and township reform in the past 20 years and more, we may find that practical evolvement of reform tend to go beyond the initial good wishes for policy design and get landed in a weak position.

With regard to township government administration, some township officials would describe their work as practical and also unpractical.

Operation of community-level government has now entered a “l(fā)ocked” state and formed a specific vicious path-dependence, with internal institutional innovation difficult to emerge.

In recent years, the government has become more aware of the significance of rural migrant workers’ training and organized a large number of training programs for rural migrant workers.