Urban public utilities are industries that provide essential universal services for the production and life of urban residents, mainly including urban water supply and drainage and sewage treatment, gas supply, central heating, urban roads and public transportation, environmental sanitation and garbage disposal, and landscaping. Therefore, the traditional theory holds that urban public utilities are a typical market failure field, and it is impossible to play the role of market competition mechanism, and advocates that in a certain geographical range, one or a very small number of state-owned enterprises monopolize and operate. However, under the traditional management system of urban public utilities, there are generally institutional problems such as low operational efficiency, monopoly operation makes enterprises lack of competitive vitality, relatively single investment channels cause serious underinvestment, and the price formation mechanism cannot stimulate enterprises to improve production efficiency. Therefore, urban utility reform is imperative. Since the reform and opening up, China's private economy has developed rapidly and its economic strength has been continuously enhanced, fully demonstrating the ability and entrepreneurial spirit of private entrepreneurs. At the same time, the policy orientation of the party and government to support private enterprises to enter urban public utilities has become increasingly clear, and policy measures have been continuously concretized. For example, as the industry authority of urban public utilities, the Ministry of Construction has successively promulgated regulations such as the Opinions on Accelerating the Marketization Process of the Municipal Public Utilities Industry, the Measures for the Administration of Municipal Public Utilities Concessions, and the Opinions on Strengthening the Supervision of Municipal Public Utilities to promote and regulate the privatization of urban public utilities. In particular, in May 2010, the State Council promulgated Several Opinions on Encouraging and Guiding the Healthy Development of Private Investment (hereinafter referred to as the "New Article 36"), which clearly pointed out that private capital is encouraged to participate in the construction of urban public utilities. Support private capital to enter urban water supply, gas supply, heat supply, sewage and garbage disposal, public transportation, urban landscaping and other fields. Encourage private capital to actively participate in the reorganization and restructuring of urban public utility enterprises and institutions, and qualified urban public utility projects may adopt market-oriented operation methods and transfer property rights or management rights to private capital. At the same time, it is necessary to further deepen the reform of the urban public utility system, actively introduce the market competition mechanism, and establish and improve the urban public utility franchise system. Establish a standardized government supervision and financial subsidy mechanism, accelerate the reform of the price and charging system for municipal public goods, and create a good institutional environment for encouraging and guiding private capital to enter the field of urban public utilities. All these make the reform of privatization of urban public utilities have a solid economic foundation and clear policy orientation. From a practical point of view, urban public utilities are relatively lagging areas in China's economic system reform, and only began to pay attention to the reform of privatization in this field in the late 90s and early 21st century. What problems have arisen during the reform process? How can reforms in this area be promoted and regulated? These are important practical questions that need to be studied. To this end, one of the 2010 National Social Science Foundation project guidelines is "Research on the Practice of Urban Public Utilities Privatization in China", considering the high correlation between government regulation and privatization, this research project is entitled "Research on Urban Public Utilities Privatization and Control Policies in China", which also means that this book is around the theme of the practice of urban public utilities privatization in China. The research in this book shows that in general, the privatization of urban public utilities has promoted the separation of government and enterprise of urban public utilities, reduced the financial burden of the government, greatly enhanced the supply capacity of urban public goods, introduced and strengthened the market competition mechanism, and improved the efficiency of urban public utilities. However, in the privatization of urban public utilities, the lack of effective government control compatible with privatization has also been exposed, prices have risen too quickly, public interests have been harmed, and in a few cities, there are even negative effects such as the loss of state-owned assets and corruption, and the government's lack of due responsibility and control. To a considerable extent, this has affected the effectiveness of the privatization reform of urban public utilities. Therefore, in order to deepen and standardize the privatization reform of urban public utilities, it is urgent to objectively evaluate the privatization practice of urban public utilities in China, clarify the policy ideas for deepening reform, establish a government control system compatible with the socialist market economy, and implement effective control over urban public utilities. With the support of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the author of this book conducted questionnaire surveys on 31 provincial construction departments (bureaus), public utility departments in 391 cities and 1917 urban public enterprises (including 976 urban water enterprises, 609 urban gas enterprises, and 332 urban waste treatment enterprises), and conducted field research in some typical cities, mastering a large number of first-hand information. Based on this large-scale investigation and research of urban public utilities, this book makes a more objective evaluation of the effectiveness and problems of urban public utilities privatization, and on this basis, it puts forward the basic policy ideas and specific policy measures for deepening the privatization reform of urban public utilities and strengthening the effective government control, in order to provide theoretical basis and empirical data for relevant government departments to scientifically formulate urban public utilities privatization reform policies. This is also the practical significance and application value of this book. At the same time, this book uses the theories of regulatory economics, industrial economics and public management, combined with the practice of privatization of urban public utilities in China, to make certain theoretical innovations in these theories, in order to enrich and promote the development of these disciplines and produce certain academic value. This book takes the emerging regulatory economics as the basic theory, based on the practice of China's urban public utility privatization reform, emphasizes the integration of theory with practice, and strives to innovate in the following aspects: First, it demonstrates the theoretical view that the privatization of urban public utilities cannot be equated with privatization. From a theoretical point of view, "private" is a concept corresponding to "direct government operation" (or "government-run"), and under the condition of state-owned ownership of the means of production, "state-owned and private" can also be implemented, "private" is not necessarily related to the ownership of the means of production, "private" does not equal "private", privatization is not equal to "privatization". From the perspective of the privatization practice of urban public utilities in China, the most common form is to franchise urban public utilities, and if the concession is for public utilities owned by the city government, even if the new operator is a private enterprise, it is only "state-owned and private"; If a new project (such as a sewage treatment plant) of a city's public utilities is franchised, after the expiration of the concession period, its assets are owned by the city government free of charge, and the ultimate ownership of the assets is still owned by the city government. Therefore, franchising, as the main form of privatization of urban public utilities in China, should belong to "privatization", not "privatization", and "privatization" cannot be equated with "privatization". This provides an important theoretical basis for deepening the privatization reform of urban public utilities. Second, the specific index system of performance evaluation of urban public utility privatization is explored and constructed. Building a performance evaluation system that conforms to China's national conditions and the actual situation of urban public utilities is an objective requirement to test the effectiveness of the privatization of urban public utilities. This book proposes that the content of the performance evaluation of urban public utility privatization includes process evaluation and result evaluation. The former mainly evaluates the fairness, fairness, openness and scientificity of the privatization process, while the latter mainly evaluates the impact of privatization on the development level of the industry, product price level, production efficiency level, service quality level and universal service level. This book explores and constructs the specific index system of privatization process and privatization result evaluation, including 9 first-level indicators and 28 second-level indicators. This can provide reference for further promoting the privatization of urban public utilities, and at the same time help to improve the theoretical system of urban public utility privatization. Third, the negative effects of privatization of urban public utilities and the demand for government regulation are analyzed. While affirming that the privatization of urban public utilities in China has achieved certain reform results, this book objectively analyzes the negative effects of privatization, such as the loss of state-owned assets, excessive price increases, the difficulty of guaranteeing universal services, the lack of government commitment, and the government's high price buyback. The reasons for the above negative effects are analyzed, including a vague understanding of the goals of privatization, lack of effective laws and policies, lack of scientific justification for specific privatization projects, and lack of effective control of private enterprises. On this basis, many negative effects are demonstrated and the government's lack of effective regulation of privatization, and the objective needs of privatization of urban public utilities for government regulation are analyzed in depth. Fourth, the urban public utility control system aimed at achieving effective regulation is constructed and demonstrated. In order to meet the new demand for government regulation by the privatization of urban public utilities and achieve effective regulation, it is necessary to establish a control system for urban public utilities and scientifically formulate and implement relevant regulatory policies. The urban public utility control system is mainly composed of the legal system, regulatory body and supervision mechanism of urban public utility control. Among them, the legal system is the basis for the effective control of urban public utilities, the relatively independent regulatory body is the premise for the effective control of urban public utilities, and the multi-level supervision mechanism is the guarantee for the effective control of urban public utilities. The basic idea of the construction of urban public utility regulatory institutions is to establish national and local hierarchical regulatory bodies, implement reasonable allocation of functions and powers between the state and local regulatory agencies, and straighten out the relationship between urban public utility regulatory institutions and other government departments. The multi-level supervision mechanism of the regulatory body includes legislative supervision, judicial supervision and social supervision. Fifth, this paper conducts an in-depth empirical analysis of the practice and performance of the privatization reform of typical urban public utilities, and puts forward targeted regulatory policy suggestions. Taking the three typical urban public utilities of urban water, pipeline gas and garbage disposal as examples, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the current situation of privatization through questionnaire surveys (involving 1917 urban utility enterprises in 31 provinces and cities) and field research. Based on the index system of privatization performance evaluation designed by this research group, the performance of privatization reform in specific industries is analyzed and objectively evaluated from the aspects of industry development level, product price level, production efficiency level, service quality level, and universal service level. According to the characteristics of different industries, specific ideas and countermeasures of corresponding control policies are put forward. Sixth, the basic idea of deepening the privatization reform of urban public utilities was put forward and demonstrated. On the basis of summarizing the lessons learned from the previous reform, deepening the reform of urban public utilities privatization must first have a clear basic idea, this book proposes and demonstrates the formation of urban public utilities privatization of laws and policies system (including privatization laws and regulations and implementation rules), urban public utilities restructuring is the basis of privatization, the implementation of classified privatization policy for urban public utilities (according to the characteristics of different urban public utilities and different business fields of the same industry to implement classified privatization), Important views such as choosing an effective way to privatize urban public utilities and strengthening the government responsibility for privatization of urban public utilities can be used as the basic ideas for deepening the reform of privatization of urban public utilities. The first part consists of chapters 1 to 3, which discusses the background and motivation of privatization of urban public utilities in China, analyzes the process and current situation of privatization, and constructs an evaluation system for the performance of privatization of urban public utilities. The second part consists of chapters 4 and 5, in view of the high correlation between urban public utility privatization and government regulation, this part starts from the discussion of the negative effects and causes of urban public utility privatization, analyzes the demand for government regulation of privatization, and discusses the issue of government regulation and supply from the basic content of regulatory system, regulatory institutions and regulatory policies. The third part, consisting of chapters 6 to 8, makes a special study on the three main urban public utilities of urban water, pipeline gas and garbage disposal, analyzes the technical and economic characteristics of these three industries, the current situation of privatization reform, evaluates the privatization performance of specific industries, and discusses the key contents of government regulatory policies according to the characteristics of the industry. Chapter 9 of this book is a relatively independent part, which summarizes and analyzes the results and problems of urban public utility privatization in China, and puts forward the basic ideas for deepening the reform of urban public utility privatization. The original manuscript of this book is the research report of the National Social Science Foundation project "Research on the Privatization and Regulation Policy of Urban Public Utilities in China" (approval number: 10BGL101). In 2012, I applied for the major project of the National Social Science Foundation of China "Research on the Innovation of China's Urban Public Utilities Government Regulatory System" (approval number: 12&ZD211), for this reason, this book makes an extended study for the research background and content of this major project. Therefore, this book is also the result of class research on this major project. This book is the result of collaborative research by the members of the research group. In this book, Wang Junhao writes the foreword and chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9; Zhou Xiaomei wrote chapters 2 and 7; Wang Jianming wrote chapters 3 and 8; Li Yunyan wrote the sixth chapter. In addition to the author of this book, Wang Ling, Liu Chengyi, Wang Fen, Gong Junjiao, Zhang Chuanfu, Jiang Xiaoqing, Li Yang, Yang Shoubin and other graduate students have done a lot of work in project research, data collection and analysis, and publication of phased research results. Whether from a theoretical or practical point of view, there are a large number of problems in the privatization reform of urban public utilities in China that need to be carefully studied and explored, the content of this book is only the "tip of the iceberg", there are many problems to be followed-up research, although the members of the research group have done their best, there are still many defects, please criticize and correct experts and scholars. Wang Junhao in Hangzhou in March 2013（AI翻译）