Wayward officials who flout authority
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2005-11-04 08:46

China has to find a way to make disobedient and defiant local officials accountable to the public interest if there is ever going to be real social harmony.

To an observer of Chinese politics, one baffling fact is that some local officials seem to get away with defying orders from the central government every now and then and in one way or another.

The latest and most disheartening example is the news that thousands of local officials across the country have been investing in and protecting illegal coalmines where many hundreds of workers have been killed.

On August 30, the central government ordered all local officials with a stake in an illegal mine to withdraw their investment by September 22, warning that they would be fired if they failed to do so.

For now, let's put aside whether the direction was too lenient.

By September 25, says the People's Daily, only 497 officials in more than 20 provinces who had a stake in the operations of an illegal mine had registered their withdrawal of their investment.

Local governments then had to postpone the deadline again and again. By October 24, says Xinhua news agency, more than 3,200 local officials had pulled out their investments in illegal mines.

Well, what were those missing 2,700 officials doing before September 22? How seriously did they take the central government's order?

And also remember this: Few of the 2,700 recalcitrant officials have been sacked from their government posts as the government had warned it would do.

Some may argue that the order itself was not all that feasible, as an article in the People's Daily suggested. But this is not the point.

If the central government really meant for its direction to be obeyed and if the local officials had really taken it seriously, no one would have dared to miss the deadline.

And you can bet that the number of corrupt connections between local officials and businesses goes beyond the 7,000-plus number of illegal coalmines nationwide. Corruption exists in other fields as well.

But the grave nature of huge casualties in illegal coal mining has turned the whole coalmine scandal into a prism through which one can see two typical political attitudes juxtaposed in China: An accountable central government on one hand and some less accountable local governments on the other.

Different behaviors

This is not to say that there is no problem such as corruption within central government departments.

What it means is that in certain cases, local officials are able to leave a righteous central government order lying prostrate at their feet.

There are many reasons for the different behavioral styles between central and local governments, such as the education level of officials. But one important reason is that central government officials are often more exposed to public and international supervision than those working in smaller cities, towns and villages.

Take just one example. You see Premier Wen Jiabao and central government ministers giving press conferences to domestic and international journalists many times a year. But you hardly ever see a mayor or magistrate so exposed.

Because they are able to walk in the dark, they can maneuver unseen.

Throughout the whole coalmine scandal, neither local lawmakers nor the local media has played a major role in ensuring that checks and balances worked.

Checks on the central government are always necessary but bringing local officials guilty of wrongdoing into the sunlight is no less important and urgent.

If local legislators and reporters had acted promptly against wrongful conduct by local officials, all those illegal coalmines would not have been protected or allowed to open in the first place.