In a March 8 article in the Wall Street Journal’s Chinese website, Xi Jinping has been preparing to build a centralized Communist Party-led state in a forceful style since taking power in late 2012, but his efforts are running into an old problem: bureaucracy.
Observers say such moves to increase centralization in a large state often foster bureaucratic inertia, subservience and other inefficient practices that are designed to please Beijing and protect his own career, but can undermine Xi’s goals.
Indeed, some local officials have become so focused on keeping Xi happy and fulfilling the party authorities’ mandate that they have lost sight of their basic responsibilities, sometimes with dire consequences.
For example, when the New Crown Pneumonia (CCP virus, Wuhan pneumonia) outbreak broke out in Wuhan in late 2019, local authorities were afraid to report bad news to the central government. This hampered a national response and led to an increase in the number of deaths.
Xi and others have publicly complained that grassroots cadres spent much of their energy on paperwork rather than devoting themselves to the front lines of Epidemic prevention and control. With multiple departments duplicating requests for information, grassroots cadres spend hours filling out forms to collect information on residents’ temperatures, symptoms, etc.
Pang Jia, a justice department worker in Mianyang, Sichuan province, who is involved in rural poverty eradication, said that Xi Jinping’s goal of eradicating poverty by 2020 is a central part of his “Chinese Dream. After Xi Jinping’s goal of eradicating poverty by 2020, local officials spent 70 percent of their Time filling out forms to certify completion of the task.
In Fuyang City, Anhui Province, local officials spent $1.2 million to erect “whitewalls” to make the houses look better in front of their superiors after they were asked to improve rural housing conditions within three months. But even this project was haphazard, with many houses only partially painted.
Despite the removal of the Fuyang municipal party secretary for face-saving projects and formalism, Xi Jinping declared a “comprehensive victory” in poverty eradication on Feb. 25, 2021.
Local officials said they were overwhelmed by bureaucratic demands from their superiors, often having to meet repeatedly to cope with the massive amount of paperwork, which sometimes weighed hundreds of pounds, the report said. One grassroots official complained of attending 15 meetings in 23 days and having no time to do actual work.
With Xi’s tighter control from the top, those below are faced with so many orders and rules that they choose to do the safest thing,” said Ryan Manuel, managing director of Official China, a Hong Kong-based research firm that analyzes Communist Party governance. “
Han Dongfang, a labor activist in mainland China, said the efforts of Communist Party officials to meet Xi’s demands amount to a political “showcase” that distracts them from other tasks, such as monitoring workplace safety.
Xi Jinping is also aware that formalism and bureaucracy are the “worst enemies” of the Communist Party, and the government has proposed some remedial measures, but they “only seem to fuel bureaucracy,” according to the report.
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