The word 财政 (cáizhèng) is formed by combining two meaningful characters: 财 (cái), which means "wealth" or "money", and 政 (zhèng), which means "governance" or "administration". Their combination conceptually fuses the idea of "wealth" with the idea of "governance", creating a new, composite meaning that refers specifically to the management of public revenue and expenditure, that is, the financial affairs of the state, or public finance. It is a classical compound where the whole signifies the domain or system of governing financial resources.