According to land media reports, Li Dongyu, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and vice chairman of the CPPCC in Shaanxi Province, proposed at this year’s two sessions that to avoid serious population loss, she suggested that small mainland counties with a population size of less than 100,000 could be merged first on a pilot basis.
Li Dongyu mentioned the high administrative costs of the Communist Party government and the wastefulness of public infrastructure, such as the county administrative divisions set up the Party Committee, the National People’s Congress, the government, the CPPCC, the discipline inspection, the public prosecution and the law and other administrative and social organizations, supporting the construction of office space and infrastructure such as science, Education, sports, Culture and health, financial support staff and infrastructure construction require a large amount of financial expenditure each year.
She also gave an example of a county with a resident population of 30,200 in 2019, local revenue of 36.61 million yuan, general public budget expenditure of 865 million yuan, more than 120 administrative institutions and social organizations, and more than 6,000 financial support staff, with a financial support staff ratio of 1:5. She suggested that merging small counties could reduce the waste of administrative resources.
Fiscal contributors are those who are paid by the state treasury for their personal income as well as office expenses and welfare benefits. In mainland China, financial support staff mainly consists of three parts: party, government and group organs, mainly for the party committee, the National People’s Congress, government, political and legal organs, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, democratic parties and mass organizations and other institutions; various types of institutions for education, scientific research, health and many other fields; party, government and group organs and institutions of the retired staff.
Ren Yuling, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and former counsellor of the State Council, said at the third session of the 10th CPPCC National Committee held in 2005: “Our ratio of government to people has long reached 26:1, which is 306 times higher than that of the Western Han Dynasty and 35 times higher than that of the late Qing Dynasty. It is worrying that the proportion of the total population eating financial meals has climbed so fast that it is unprecedented!”
In 2005, Zhou Tianyong, deputy director of the Research Office of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, wrote that the actual number of civil servants and quasi-civil servants in mainland China supported by the state treasury exceeded 70 million, with a ratio of 1:18 between the government and the people.
China Economic Weekly reported that according to the National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party of China (NBSC), the total number of government employees financially supported by the government in 2008 was 39.46 million, a ratio of 1:34. It is reported that the NBSC has not compiled any statistics on the total number of financially supported employees since 2008.
The CCP’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced the number of civil servants in 2016, which reached 7.16 million, and some scholars have projected that if all taxpayer-supported state-owned enterprises and institutions are added, the total number of public employees exceeds 70 million, and the ratio of government to the public is at an all-Time high. The CCP is still recruiting new civil servants at all levels of government every year.
According to Hong Kong‘s Trend, the CCP spent more than 67.5 billion yuan annually on retired senior officials in 2014. in 2004, retired senior officials at the level of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, the Chairman of the National People’s Congress, the Vice Chairman of the State Council, and the Vice Chairman of the Central Guardian Committee alone spent a whopping 326 million yuan at public expense, or an average of 27.25 million yuan each. Other levels are allocated level by level, creating a huge state expenditure.
Mainland Chinese taxpayers support not only serving and retired administrative officials, but also a range of party committee officials who should be supported by the CCP itself.
Professor Yang Shaozheng of Guizhou University, who was dismissed for his online comments, was directly offended by the authorities because he publicly criticized the CCP for “supporting the Party with public funds” in an article published overseas.
In his article in Free Asia, Yang criticized the Chinese Communist Party for using tax money and state funds to support a total of about 20 million full-time party workers and some non-party association workers each year, causing a cost to society valued at about 20 trillion RMB. If the situation does not change, society will eventually collapse, and asks, “Can such a huge amount of resources really be ignored?”
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