From October 27-28, 2016, the 7th International Conference on Public Administration in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges was held in Macao, China. It is an important event for the global academia of public administration and is held every two years. The conference was jointly hosted by Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau of the Macau Special Administrative Region, Center for Chinese Public Administration Research at Sun Yat-sen University, the University of Macau and Macao Foundation, and was co-hosted by Macao Inter-Regional Public Administration Study Association, Macao Public Administration Management Association. Professor Guoxian Bao, Dean of School of Management was invited to attend the conference.

The conference lasted for 2 days and was divided into three sessions and 14 group discussions. Professor Bao gave a speech on A Study on Performance Evaluation System of China's County-level Government from the Perspective PV-GPG and took questions from the audience.

In addition, the sponsors of the conference have invited over 60 scholars from 13 countries and regions such as mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, UK and US. They discussed “The Improvement of Public Governance: Challenge and Response”. The topic included the improvement of public governance, performance evaluation of public sectors, reform and development of civil servant system, reform of governance, social welfare in economic depression, capability building of government, changing of social policy and government function, mechanism and effect of transformation of public governance, information technology and management, public service delivery, reform and innovation of local government, social risk administration, reform and outlook of public administration, human resource development and management in public sections, sustainable development of public finance, administration accountability and corrupt governance.

During the conference, Professor Bao and Dr. Xiang Ma discussed issues of common interests with other guests based on team research results.