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
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
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
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
local Chinese authorities.
The
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.