More red tape, less progress: China’s cadres struggle to adopt ‘error tolerance’
Beijing has long called for easing the burden of local cadres and reining in formalism and bureaucratic excess – a long-standing challenge within China’s vast administrative system.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his cadres sing the Communist song during the closing ceremony for the 19th Party Congress held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Oct 24, 2017. (Photo: AP/Ng Han Guan)
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BEIJING: Despite repeated directives to ease the burden on local officials and curb formalism, many of China’s cadres still find themselves trapped in a frustrating cycle of working harder yet achieving fewer tangible results, according to state-linked media.
Banyuetan, an influential biweekly magazine affiliated with state news agency Xinhua, outlined five symptoms of this “busier-but-emptier” phenomenon in a report published on its website on Tuesday (Jun 2).
Beijing has long called for easing the burden of local cadres and reining in formalism and bureaucratic excess – a long-standing challenge within China’s vast administrative system – in a bid to improve governance and better support high-quality development.
Yet, interviews with such officials revealed that many remained weighed down by bureaucratic demands that prioritise paperwork and compliance over tangible results, continuing to drain time and energy, the report said.
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One commonly cited example was the rise of “scripted meetings” – where summaries and briefing materials are drafted before discussions even take place.
According to Banyuetan, local officials said the practice generated large amounts of paperwork that mainly satisfied meeting requirements rather than reflecting reality, diverting time and resources away from implementing policies and addressing underlying problems.
Others singled out excessively detailed procedural requirements from higher departments.
A village official pointed to disputes that previously could be resolved through informal mediation and direct communication but now often required extensive paperwork, digital uploads and full audio-video documentation.
“The compliance procedures can take more time than the mediation itself,” the official said, adding that older cadres sometimes had to bring younger colleagues along simply to handle the required smartphone-based tasks.
Over time, an excessive focus on procedural compliance could overshadow substantive outcomes, the report warned.
It also noted the difficulty of implementing the “error-tolerance mechanism”, a formal institutional framework introduced by the Communist Party to protect local officials, cadres and state-owned enterprise executives from political or career punishment when their well-intentioned, innovative policies or reforms fail.
While the policy was introduced to protect officials acting in good faith, some local cadres said fear of complaints and accountability measures continued to discourage initiative.
“Whatever we do, the first thing we think about is whether it could cause trouble,” a township official was cited as saying in the report.
Data collection has emerged as another source of frustration. Officials described frequent requests for statistics on tight deadlines, sometimes involving information that is difficult to verify within the allotted time.
In response, some admitted to resorting to outdated records or fabricated data simply to meet reporting requirements.
The report also said an excessive focus on documentation had fostered a culture of “leaving a mark”, as some officials treated paper trails as a safeguard against accountability.
But this practice, it cautioned, could “drain morale and sap the energy” of local officials, who could become preoccupied with producing and retroactively compiling records for inspection rather than focusing on substantive work.
“Requirements for meeting materials at the grass-roots level should be streamlined, and officials should be encouraged to speak without prepared scripts,” an official said, according to the report.
Experts cited in the report suggested clearer lines of responsibility and a shift from process-based assessments to outcome-based evaluations.
They said more needed to be done to set up clearer and more practical criteria for applying the error-tolerance mechanism, as well as to make greater use of case studies and precedents.
This article was first published on SCMP.
Source: South China Morning Post/st(ht)
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