China began its budgetary reform in the 1990s and recently revised its Budget Law in 2014. With China's transition towards a "Tax State" and “Budget State,” has the budget reform genuinely become a breakthrough point of political reform and significantly alter the constitutional and administrative structure, thereby improving its governance legitimacy? If not, why? Part One conducts a comparative historical analysis on the budgetary (law) reforms of China, France, and the US, exploring how the two main threads of strengthening the state’s infrastructural power and restricting its despotic power developed in different historical periods. The initial choice and reform sequence of administrative rationalization and political democratization have a decisive impact on the legislative-administrative relation. From the view of incentive-compatibility, the difficulty of budgetary democratization reform is enormously greater than that of a budgetary rationalization reform. Part Two analyzes the effects and barriers of the contemporary budgetary reforms on horizontal and vertical power-distribution and explores how public organs participated in the reform. The examination of the key actors above indicates a crucial dilemma for China's legal reform. On the one hand, the budgetary reform is genuinely changing China's constitutional structure. It has partly changed the political decision-making process, enhanced constitutional checks and balance, and highlighted the pressure for further reform. On the other hand, the core of constitutional structure cannot be changed by a purely technical reform, because the vested interest groups impede it.