Mainland authorities are fond of being called 'the people's government', and their most famous motto is to 'serve the people'. But these days, their chief mission appears to be to 'charge the people'.
'Vying with the people for profit' has become a popular phrase among cynical mainlanders in recent years to describe how central and local government departments forgo their primary roles as providers of public services and abuse their power to seize or create opportunities to fleece ordinary, hapless mainlanders.
Examples abound. Take property development. Local authorities collude with developers to force farmers to sell their land cheaply and then flog the finished residential or office buildings at high prices, artificially boosting real estate prices beyond the reach of many people.
Many central and local government departments function more like business groups representing certain interests except that they control both the power and resources.
Mainland analysts have long argued that 'the government vying with the people for profit' is one of the main reasons that tens of thousands of riots and protests occur.
There are examples everywhere of government departments abusing their power to profit at the expense of the people they are meant to serve. Take public parks. In Hong Kong, all the parks are free and well maintained by the government. In London, even the famous downtown parks, such as Hyde Park, are free.
But in the People's Republic, people have to pay, sometimes exorbitantly, to get into major public parks. And if that were not enough, authorities try to raise the prices significantly during public holidays.