Rubber chicken for China's sick
soul By Kent Ewing
HONG
KONG - The grand plan to rein in China's runaway
economy and heal multiple social and environmental
ills, unveiled last week at the annual session of
the National People's Congress (NPC), has excited
legions of bureaucrats and pushed state media into
overdrive. It promises to create a more efficient,
transparent and accountable government through the
formation of five new super ministries that will
streamline the wayward bureaucracy and expedite
needed economic, social and environmental reforms.
An explanatory report by the State
Council, the government's highest executive body,
stated, "The reshuffling is aimed at resolving
long-term problems and contradictions as China's
economy grows." State media have hailed the
shake-up as a
major
reform effort that will greatly strengthen
national planning.
Unfortunately, however,
China's problems cannot be cured by structural
readjustments, no matter how sweeping and
impressive they may appear. The real issue, which
the leadership is loathe to address, is China's
sick soul. And this latest round of NPC reforms
amounts to little more than chicken (and rubber
chicken at that) for that battered soul.
The 30-year culture of greed and
corruption that has fueled the country's
phenomenal economic rise cannot be reversed with a
bureaucratic wave of the wand. Indeed, that is the
Chinese leadership's chief problem right now -
offering false, bureaucratic solutions to problems
that have deep roots in a flawed political
culture. And, of course, it does not help that
China's legal structure was destroyed during Mao
Zedong's disastrous Cultural Revolution in the
1960s and, in an ongoing project, is being rebuilt
brick by brick.
Let's not forget that this
is Beijing's sixth cabinet remake since 1982, so
this is what Chinese leaders do to reassure the
people when things are going wrong. And, on the
surface, the latest reshuffle qualifies as a big
splash. Look deeper, however, and the waters of
Chinese society remain troubled and murky.
Despite repeated attempts to cool the
overheating economy with interest-rate hikes and
restrictions on bank lending, economic growth
leaped ahead at 11.4% last year, and inflation
surged to a 12-year high of 8.7% last month.
Particularly worrying were food prices, which make
up one-third of the country's consumer price index
and rose 23.3% year-on-year last month. Pork (a
Chinese favorite) led the way, with prices rising
63%, but the cost of vegetables and edible oil
also increased by 46% and 41%, respectively.
While China's winter snowstorms no doubt
played a part in the alarming price surges, these
figures must nevertheless be deeply worrisome to
President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and the
nearly 3,000 NPC deputies that convened last week
in Beijing. Protests from the grassroots - already
a significant problem because of rampant official
corruption and the growing income gap between rich
and poor and urban and rural in Chinese society -
can only be exacerbated by these latest
developments.
What to do? In China -
where, despite all the pre-Olympic promises of
greater press freedom and international hopes of
political reform, maintaining the supreme power of
the Communist Party remains national priority
number one - bureaucratic smoke-and-mirrors is to
be expected. This latest shake-up should not be
misconstrued as a grand plan to tackle
multifarious challenges; rather, it represents a
messy compromise between the dizzying points of
power spread out across the vast bureaucracy.
That said, some of the changes should make
a positive difference. For example, upgrading
the environmental watchdog, the State
Environmental Protection Administration, to a
cabinet-level ministry was long overdue and should
give the formerly toothless agency more influence.
Let's hope so as China's rivers, lakes and air
become increasingly more poisonous as its
juggernaut of an economy races along. To truly
develop a coordinated and effective regulatory
regime devoted to restoring China's degraded
environment, however, the new ministry will
require a much bigger budget and staff than the
agency possessed. Last week's announcement left
the budgetary future of the ministry unclear.
Although it was not part of the hoopla
over new ministries, the absorption of the largely
ineffectual State Food and Drug Administration
into the already-existing Ministry of Health may
also prove a positive change. Let's hope this
means that China can now make more reliable
guarantees on the quality of its exports, which in
the past year have repeatedly been a source of
scandal involving a wide range of products - from
tainted foods and drugs to dangerous toys and
exploding tires. The country has taken an
international beating over the inferior quality of
some of its exports. The world listened, mostly
unconvinced, to Beijing's vehement defense of its
safety record. This move is intended to offer
further reassurance, but there is still a lot of
work to do.
The new Ministry of Transport
- which absorbs roads, highways, waterways and
aviation - raises more questions than it answers.
It is hard to see how it will function effectively
without the inclusion of the country's dinosaur of
a railway monopoly, whose weaknesses were exposed
during the widespread transportation paralysis
caused by recent winter storms. The worst winter
weather in 50 years left tens of thousands of
travelers stranded in the east and south during
the week-long Lunar New Year holiday.
As
the overwhelming majority of the Chinese
population travels by train, failure to include
the rail network in the new ministry is a huge
omission betraying the bureaucratic infighting
that the restructuring is really all about. In
other transport sectors, market forces are
enhancing quality and encouraging competition, but
the Ministry of Railways has retained its
throwback status as a state monopoly. That
explains why, in a country of 1.3 billion people
who are heavily reliant on rail transport, China
can claim only 70,000 kilometers of track. By
contrast, the US, which is about the same physical
size as China but has only a quarter of its
population, has more than 212,000 kilometers of
track.
While the Ministry of Railways'
days are surely numbered, its bureaucrats have
lived to fight another day. Meanwhile, don't
expect a coherent transportation scheme with such
a big, backward player still operating by its own
set of rules.
The new Ministry of Industry
and Information faces a similar problem. The
ministry will assume responsibilities previously
held by the National Development and Reform
Commission - the central-planning body that
appears to be the biggest loser in the shake-up -
the Commission of Science Technology and Industry
for National Defense, the Ministry of Information
Industry and the State Council Information Office.
Conspicuously absent from the new
ministry's portfolio, however, is regulation of
the electronic media, which will remain in the
hands of the unpredictable State Administration of
Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). Clearly, the
SARFT censors were not ready to cede power to
their new Big Brother. This means the wait must
continue before the badly needed restructuring of
radio and telecommunications can commence.
The new Ministry of Human Resources and
Social Security, which subsumes both the Ministry
of Personnel and the Ministry of Labor, is an
attempt to address the widening inequality in the
way the central government has dealt with
professionals and common laborers. And the new
Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction
will be given the daunting task of coming to grips
with skyrocketing real-estate prices.
A
plan for a super Energy Ministry is also in the
works. For now, however, bureaucrats must settle
for a split in power, with a newly created energy
commission given the brief of developing national
energy strategies but a separate energy bureau
charged with administering and overseeing the
sector. Again, it's a bureaucratic tug-of-war.
Super ministries for Agriculture, Finance
and Culture are also planned for the future, but
let's not get ahead of ourselves. Things are
complicated enough for the present - or are they?
Forget all the new acronyms that have been
created and the old ones that have been lost. In
the end, it is all pretty simple: bureaucratic
restructuring is what masquerades as reform in
China. Meanwhile, the rich-poor gap widens, the
environment becomes increasingly defiled and
corrupt local officials - rooted for the past 30
years in a culture of profit and greed - ignore
the high-sounding rhetoric of the NPC and carry on
with business as usual.
Kent Ewing is a
teacher and writer at Hong Kong International
School. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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