China’s endless war on red tape leads to … more red tape

China’s war on bureaucratic window dressing has been stepped up, with 2019 declared the year of reducing the burden on grass-roots officials.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is counting on the millions of junior party cadres across the country to implement his ambitious campaigns to end corruption, alleviate poverty and rejuvenate the nation. Instead, they often find themselves entangled in endless meetings and exhausted by the mountains of reports they are required to prepare.

Li, a staffer at a county-level legislature in the southern province of Guangdong, is one of the grass-roots cadres who finds little time for the real business of his job while tied up with demands from mid-level civil servants more interested in appearances than results.

He tells the story of a township official who received a text message from his boss asking him for photos of himself and a number of his “social stability targets”, as potential troublemakers are known. The photos were for filing, as proof that the official had fulfilled his work quota.

“This was terrible,” Li said. “If any problems occurred, the township official would have been fired right away.”

News of the episode, which occurred in 2017, was widely circulated among junior cadres – long used to the unreasonable demands of their superiors – as one of many examples of the deep-rooted bureaucracy and red tape which have plagued the Communist Party for decades.