Gadfly entrepreneur fires salvo against China’s red tape, after earlier complaint got him a trip to premier’s office

A Chinese hotelier and entrepreneur has spoken out publicly against what he calls persistent and lingering government red tape, two years after his initial complaints led to an extraordinary audience with the country’s prime minister and top policymakers.

Chinese bureaucrats are still engaged in “capricious policymaking”, hiding behind opaque rules and regulations to collect arbitrary fees and charges, even though the government had pledged to cut out unnecessary procedures, said Wu Hai, founder of the Orange Hotel Group of travellers’ inns.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, with whom Wu met two years ago “has been working so hard, but his intentions and directions were not well understood by the lower levels of authorities and officials,” Wu wrote on his Weibo microblog account. “They failed to get things done.”

Wu’s salvo illustrates the myriad challenges faced by Li in his second five-year term as premier, as he grapples with ballooning debt among state firms and local governments amid slower economic growth pace, all the while maintaining a business environment that’s conducive to private investments and innovation.

Wu is no stranger to being the gadfly. He addressed a 5,000-word blog post to Li in March 2015, in which he laid out case examples of an overbearing Chinese bureaucracy, along with his suggestions for improvement.

That blog post landed Wu a trip to the premier’s Zhongnanhai office in Beijing two months later, where Li had assembled officials from the tax, business and industries departments to discuss ways to cut red tape and improve efficiency. Wu was invited to sit in on the discussions.