Collaborative governance has become an important strategy in public governance as a tool for complying with social development and meeting the needs of public policies. This research integrates the general model of collaborative governance with three kinds of models of public management domain governance, namely, bureaucratic, contract, and network governance. The models are then applied as theoretical framework for analyzing the horizontal inter-governmental relationship in collaborative governance. Three typical cases of collaborative governance in China were selected, namely, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) integration, the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) coordination, and the convergence and development of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) and local government of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The three collaborative governance models have explanatory guidance for governance practice. Local governments can subsequently choose the appropriate collaborative governance models according to the starting conditions of collaborative governance and handle the horizontal inter-governmental relations properly.