As economy grows, China's public servants ordered to trim the fat
TED ANTHONY, Associated Press Writer
Friday, March 12, 2004
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(03-12) 00:26 PST BEIJING (AP) --
China's communists began as a guerrilla movement in a cave, promising to wrest the country from corruption's clutches and deliver it to the peasants and the workers. But over the decades, by the party's own admission, the road to utopia became a little too carpeted.
Official cars and drivers were depleting local budgets. "Long-winded" meetings, often over lunch and liquor, were undercutting productivity. In 2002, according to state media, the government spent $12 billion in public funds on banquets.
This week, as a new generation of Chinese leaders caps its first year by coining a new slogan of "putting people first," the push to trim fat and eradicate official waste is becoming ever more urgent -- because of both money and simple public relations.
"We must persist in doing down-to-earth work, seek practical results, conserve manpower and refrain from `vanity projects' that waste both money and manpower," Premier Wen Jiabao said last week in his state-of-the-nation speech to the National People's Congress, the figurehead parliament.
In recent months, the government has told state media to reduce coverage of official ceremonies. Leaders have been ordered to cut foreign travel and, when they had to go abroad, eliminate the nationally televised handshake-fests that accompanied their departure. Foreign dignitaries have lost the motorcycle escorts that guided them through Beijing traffic.
Still, for the communist leadership, heirs of an insurgency directed by Mao Zedong from the catacombs of northern China in the 1940s, the challenge is daunting.
Decades of harsh top-down governance left public servants afraid to put results over process. As the bureaucracy bloated, paper-pushing -- duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate -- became a haven for those trying to do their jobs without taking any risks.
At the same time, "cadres" -- the Communist Party's foot soldiers -- grew accustomed to the perks that accompanied even meager power, and the Chinese culture of eating and drinking offered a convenient outlet for excess.
The new leadership, under President Hu Jintao, is desperate to change such perceptions as it struggles to convince the people it is worthy of their trust. Even as the government pushes the boom economy for the country, it is preaching the ethics of self-denial within its own ranks.
"Pleasure leads to demise," the government's official Xinhua News Agency warned in one recent commentary. In another, it emphasized the necessity "to firmly investigate and deal with leading cadres who are deeply interested in ostentatiousness."
Since former Premier Zhu Rongji upbraided wastrels in the civil-service ranks -- "This must stop," he said at the 2002 congress -- a plethora of proclamations have targeted public officials from the loftiest leaders to the lowest-paid parking attendants.
Now, anyone with government plates who uses a siren to bypass clogged roads faces punishment, and civil servants outside law enforcement have been barred from sporting "police-style outfits" at work.
A circular from both the central government and the Communist Party last year recommended videoconferencing to "reduce the number of face-to-face meetings." Municipal governments swung into action, limiting meetings to 90 austere minutes -- or so they said.
"Cadres have to attend all large, medium-sized and small meetings. Everyone says something and wastes their breath," said Zhou Yongkang, then a top official in the southwestern province of Sichuan. His efforts were rewarded; he's now the country's public security minister.
Even the congress itself -- an annual junket that lavishes attention and comfort upon far-flung delegates -- is feeling the pinch: This year's session, delegates say, is being held to 10 days because of belt-tightening efforts.
For the more than 5,000 delegates to the congress and its companion advisory body, that means less pampering with limousines and hotels, fewer banquets and shorter bursts of VIP treatment in the carpeted halls of communist power.
No one's complaining publicly, and some delegates are praising the efforts to make sure officials live like the people they rule.
"Everybody should be equal, so I'm glad to see government made simpler," said delegate Fan Mingwu, 60, an Oxford-trained physics professor. He runs the particle accelerator at Huadong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, in central China.
While most acknowledge that waste remains widespread, for the first time in years leaders are back to trumpeting the notion that their legitimacy is based on earning public trust and acting like the country's stewards rather than its overlords.
"The accumulated problems of the government itself have become serious," said Wu Aiming, a public administration professor at People's University in Beijing, reflecting the official line. "The government has no alternative but to undertake reforms."
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