In the bureaucratic system,the top-down administrative assessment enhances the task pressure and generates a variety of responding ways to reduce the burden of grassroots. Based on the analytical framework of pressure-response,this paper investigates the rural grassroots governance and finds that the administrative assessment characterized by refined management not only intensifies the pressure of top-down policy implementation,but also shapes an antagonistic relation between the upper-level government and the grassroots government,characterized by the normal assessment and the elimination response,the indefinite supervision and the patchwork response,the commitment to responsibility statements and the selective resolution. In order to reduce the risk of inspection and accountability,the target-oriented bottom response process also shows the interdisciplinary collusion from “fragmentation” to “cooperation and interaction”,the strategic change from “rigid constraint” to “flexible combination”,and the shift from “trace management” to “classified governance”. Therefore,governments of all levels should enhance the effectiveness of policy,making a match between the rigid constraint of policy implementation and the flexible mechanism in objective assessment,and improve the implementation ability of cadres at the grassroots level based on expanding the space of independent governance,so as to realize the central government’s decree of burden alleviation.