The governance of megacities is an important component of China's national governance. Improving the responsiveness of grassroots governments in megacities is conducive to building a service-oriented government centered on individual well-being. The “Swift Response to Public Complaints” mechanism, originating in Beijing, China's capital, is a significant reform innovation aimed at improving the responsiveness of grassroots governments—that is, efficiently responding to public demands—through the 12345 hotline. This reform has received high attention from the central government and has been promoted nationwide. However, with the nationwide rollout of the “Swift Response to Public Complaints” mechanism, driven by the 12345 citizen hotline, many local practices have faced a structural dilemma of being “busy but ineffective”. The theoretical community has two competing research paths: “increasing” and “decreasing” the intensity of response, leading to a dilemma.

This paper introduces a typological analytical framework based on the attributes of demands, and examines the internal process of effective response by grassroots governments in megacities using a case study of D Street in Beijing. The results show that, based on the interaction of demands based on “publicness-rationality” grassroots governments differentiate into four action strategies: service optimization, substantive resolution, emotional reassurance, and decentralization of consultation.

This paper further derives a theoretical explanation of “transformative response”: as an open system constantly interacting with its environment, rational grassroots government organizations view the large-scale public demands within their jurisdiction as a multi-layered system with positive and negative externalities. By linking the handling of these demands with multiple basic governance functions, they transform them from governance burdens and tasks into positive elements such as governance resources and leverage points, thereby restoring the grassroots governance ecosystem. This process ultimately reduces the likelihood of demands arising at their source, alleviates pressure from demands and offsets institutional pressure, and achieves coordination rather than suppression with other governance efforts. This situation is more pronounced in the context of megacities. In this respect, a short-sighted, pragmatic response lacking transformative response may be a deep-seated reason for the “inefficient results” of grassroots governance in megacities.

Therefore, this paper suggests achieving a balanced response from two aspects: diversion from higher levels and transformation at the grassroots level. This paper's theoretical contributions include incorporating the attributes of demands into research on grassroots government responsiveness and proposing the theoretical concept of “transformational response”, thus enriching current theoretical work. Furthermore, this paper offers a practical action path for shifting government responsiveness from a short-term perspective to a long-term one.

The construction of a people-centred service-oriented government is driving the mode of public service provision from passive response to proactive service. Governments around the world have adopted a proactive stance of proactive services to bear most of the administrative costs of the public, yet not all proactive government services improve public satisfaction. The field study found that when the government provides door-to-door services such as home care and welfare accreditation it incurs widespread public complaints. Why does the government's proactive provision of door-to-door services lead to public dissatisfaction? This paradox becomes the starting point of this paper. Existing studies have mainly discussed the evaluation of public satisfaction in general service scenarios and lacked analyses of public satisfaction in door-to-door service scenarios.

This paper reduces people's negative service evaluations to negative public service experiences, and constructs an analytical framework for the paradox of door-to-door service satisfaction from the dimensions of service environment and service process. From the perspective of service environment, the government door-to-door service opens up a channel for the administrative system to intervene deeply in the private life field, and when the people's life field becomes the scene of the government's mandatory service, the administrative nature of the public service conflicts with the social nature of the private life, and the people feel a lot of situational pressures while accepting the service; from the perspective of the service process, the government door-to-door service stimulates the people's demand expression by the government's initiative, and the service supply is stimulated by the administrative system. From the perspective of service process, the government door-to-door service also stimulates the expression of people's needs because of the government's initiative, while the service supply is controlled by the administrative system and still follows the uniform standards, which directly leads to the contradiction between the diffuse nature of individual needs and the standardisation of public services, and the door-to-door service provides service supply but fails to meet the people's diversified and individualised needs, and the people are faced with the gap of expectations before and after the service. Situational pressures and expectation gaps lead to negative evaluations of government door-to-door services.

This reveals that we should pay attention not only to the supply side of services, but also to the demand side of services, and even more so to the world beyond services. Firstly, the design of public service experience should be strengthened on the basis of cooperation between the government and the people; secondly, the humanistic care in the process of service provision should be enhanced; and lastly, reasonable administrative burdens should be used to reduce individuals' unreasonable expectations of public services. In short, the government should reduce the disruption to people's lives brought about by excessive proactive behaviour and maintain appropriate service “white space”.