At the end of the 13th Five-year Plan，the governance focus of the 36 key cities in China has also shifted from the stage of urban development and construction to the advanced stage of urban management and social governance. The smart city mode endowed by high technology has not fully matched the traditional urban management mode and the relatively conservative social status quo，failing to play its significant role. This paper first sorts out the top-level decisions of urban governance modernization at the national level，and then，based on the in-depth analysis of the evaluation results of the 2017 urban management level in China，it explores the multivariate characteristics of current urban management development transformation and the strategic path to improve China’s governance transformation of urban management.