Numerous local Chinese authorities have launched "democratic evaluation" (民主评议) campaigns in recent months. These are aimed at improving the accountability and transparency of local governance by using a degree of citizen participation, under tight Party controls, to evaluate the performance of local officials. (See below for the details of one such campaign, in Shanxi province.)

    Chinese authorities seek to use these measures as a means to address pervasive corruption and abuse in local Chinese governments. But the continued monopoly of local Party influence over these efforts, and the unwillingness of Chinese authorities to create truly independent institutions to monitor Party and government power, raises questions as to their likelihood of success.

    Chinese central authorities are making efforts to increase governmental transparency and accountability. This is not exactly new. Official directives going back to late 1990s have stressed both of these as necessary elements for clean governance. But these efforts were boosted in particular by a joint 2005 directive issued by central Party and State Council that orders government information to generally be made public and encourages greater use of public participation in supervising government decisions. For more information, see the relevant section of the 2006 annual report issued by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

    These efforts are percolating down through the vast Chinese bureaucracy. For example, in the spring of 2007, the State Council issued the first national open government regulations. Many local governments are launching initiatives aimed at using a degree of public participation and transparency to supervise government actions.

    For example, on April 28, 2007, the general office of the Shanxi provincial government issued an "Opinion on Developing Democratic Evaluation of Government Work," setting out the outline of a year-long campaign that they are carrying out this year under the leadership of the local Party committee. The Shanxi evaluation campaign designates several dozen government bureaus as targets for evaluation, including education, health, public security, and judicial authorities. It is aimed at reviewing the openness and transparency of these bureaus' operations, and the extent to which they are legally fulfilling their duties. The Shanxi plan resembles '"democratic evaluation" programs adopted and pursued by other local Chinese authorities.

    The Shanxi program is divided into three stages. The first is the start-up phase, and runs for the month of April. Each local government within Shanxi province is to establish an “evaluation office” to be staffed with a team of evaluators drawn from members of local people’s congresses, government officials, approved democratic parties, social organizations, and the media. Each government bureau to be evaluated is required to make a 1500 character statement of good governance and the goals they seek to reach, which is to be publicized in the media. And the evaluation offices are supposed to establish media hotlines for people to call in complaints regarding the government bureaus in question.

    The second stage is the evaluation stage and runs from May through the end of October. The evaluation team in each locality is charged with holding public conferences, distributing questionnaires, and collecting popular opinions and suggestions regarding governance problems with particular bureaus. The evaluation team is to subsequently hold conferences with the government bureau in question to discuss problems raised (with key Party leaders in attendance). And then, following these conferences, public hearings are to be organized between evaluators, government bureaus under examination, and selected citizens to collectively discuss particular problems. Each evaluation office is also to conduct secret investigations of the bureaus under review and expose typical problems in the media. Further, provincial authorities are charged with organizing a 100,000 questionnaire survey of citizen attitudes regarding the work performance of the bureaus in question. 

    Following the hearings and exposures of particular problems, each bureau under investigation is charged with responding to these problems within a discrete time period.

    The third stage of the campaign is the review phase, and runs from November 2007 to March 2008. Here, the work of each bureau and level of government is analyzed and reviewed. Specifically, the success of local governments in handling problems raised and the citizen opinions toward the government bureaus in question are funneled toward local Party committees and organization bureaus. These groups, in turn, factor success or failure into the annual work evaluations of the government officials in question. Those with positive results receive career rewards. Those with negative results, sanctions.

    As you can tell from the brief description above, this is a really a broad conceptual plan. Many important details are left for local municipal and township officials to fill in with their own plans for implementation. Notice two key aspects of the plan.

    First, notice that there is some room for citizen and civil society participation in these efforts. Officials want citizen participation in answering questionnaires. They want social organizations to be part of the evaluation process. They seek to use the media and legislative hearings as a means to ferret out corruption and poor governance. They need the bottom-up flow of information to figure out what is going on, and what is going wrong, with local governance.

    But notice the second aspect as well - the emphasis on top-down, particularly Party control of the process. There's an absence of an effort to establish long-term independent mechanisms which might check official power. Evaluators to be chosen from reliable sources – such as government, LPC officials, approved non-democratic parties. Actual citizen input into the process is indirect – managed by the official evaluators, and channeled in the end to Party and government officials for final action.

    The fundamental conflict between these two goals raises questions as to whether they can be effective. After all, if ultimate responsibility for collecting citizen opinions and evaluating the performance of local officials doesn’t rest with any kind of independent institution, but with the local officials themselves, then you’ve got a classic principal-agent problem.