Opinion / You Nuo
Initiatives from local governments necessary
By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-11-21 06:00
Officials don't usually get so much attention from the press when they
retire. But as Zhang Baoqing, the former vice-minister of education, left
his office for the last time, he was given the celebrity treatment by the
Chinese-language press for revealing that policies from Zhongnanhai the
compound of the central government are often ignored by local officials.
There was actually nothing new in what he said. That Zhongnanhai's orders
do not travel beyond its walls is an old saying in Beijing. People heard
it from the 1990s.
Differences between central and local governments are not necessarily a
bad thing. When differences occur and there is corruption, be it at the
local or central level, all China has to do is to have the alleged
law-breakers arrested and sent for trial. However, where central and
local officials do not share the same priorities, blaming one side does
not build a consensus or solve the problem.
The fact is that there can be new opportunities for reform wherever
central and local governments work together to identify problems and find
solutions.
Throughout the 1990s, there were plenty of individuals including scholars
in the West who had never lived in China saying China was falling apart
because of growing tension in its central/local government relations.
As it turned out, these differences neither reflected Beijing's
inadequate ties with local governments nor signalled those local
governments' readiness to break away from the former's orbit. The
prophets of doom of the 1990s have failed to appreciate this society's
inherent strengths.
In former vice-minister Zhang's case, he might have a legitimate reason
to fly into a temper, as he was criticizing local officials who had
turned a deaf ear to Beijing's requirement for student loans. But it is
not always so black and white.
Many of the reforms were launched on the local level, with no approval
from central government. But they were a good effort and injected fresh
ideas and experience into the old way of doing things.
For instance, last week the Chinese press carried obituaries for Ren
Zhongyi, a former leader of Guangdong Province in South China. He was the
first man in China to liberalize grocery prices and risk being accused of
copying the capitalist market economy at a time when food was still under
the rigid ration system in the rest of the country.
In reality, China's first private farms, first privately-owned factories,
first joint-stock companies, first stock exchanges, and first
privately-owned schools were all local efforts. The same was true of many
companies. But when they became successful they were recognized as pilot
reform projects.
Without those initiatives outside Zhongnanhai's walls, any change would
entirely be powered by the central government in finance and human
resources, in ideas and in plans. The cost of Chinese reform would have
become formidable. China's success story today is to a large extent the
result of initiatives at both the central and local levels.
Understandably, whenever progress does not come along in an orderly way,
and whenever local initiatives appear too crude, officials in the central
government start accusing their local counterparts of narrow-mindedness
and incompetence.
But in the end, they and their local counterparts will have to work
together again. So perhaps the most important thing central government
officials can do is to design a large framework in which Zhongnanhai's
orders and local initiatives are balanced.
In the development of education we may be seeing some encouraging signs
of such a balance. The sector has for a long time been a centralized
monopoly, like the Chinese railway service was. But on November 18, an
educational joint venture was launched in Zhuhai, a southern coastal
city, by the Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong's Baptist
University. This is yet another local initiative, in an area where
changes are never thought to be easy.
Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 11/21/2005 page4)
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