Abstract: To meet the needs of social development in different historical stages, formal community governance in the UK demonstrates five modes at different historical periods. This paper first critically reviews those modes, evaluates their main features and explores how community governance remains committed to the basic principle of helping people to help themselves for building an equitable and harmonious society. Then, it draws lessons from the community governance experience in the UK to reflect on the current situation of the community governance in China. To promote the effectiveness of the community governance in China, it suggests that all stakeholders should recognize community governance principles, the governance objectives should focus on the community problems; the governance strategies should be able to achieve governance objectives, and governance competences should be able to perform governance strategies.

Key words: UK, community governance, governance model