Abstract: Drawing on the "sociological imagination" proposed by the sociologist Mills, we can analyze various knowledge barriers that hamper the imagination of China's public administration: managementism, self-colonialism, empiricism, and philosophical poverty. Only by breaking away from the shackles of these barriers of knowledge can China's public administration evoke and arouse the academic imagination it deserves, and develop into a subject that is actually useful to the country and society in the 21^st century. To this end, China's public administration needs to develop five kinds of academic imagination: historical imagination, anthropological imagination, critically constructed imagination, large-scale imagination, and gender imagination.