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Local officials seek massage and serve mammon during office hours
By Wan Lixin |
September 16, 2010, Thursday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
SINCE August 20, a campaign in Taiyuan and Xinzhou, Shanxi Province, has caught a total of 296 cadres enjoying themselves in bathhouses, teahouses, karaoke bars and other entertainment venues during office hours.
Seventy-nine men have been punished and the other 217 may be disciplined soon. After the roundup, local authorities issued a circular prohibiting cadres from using office hours to get a massage, gamble, play cards, mahjong, chess or computer games.
I guess that soon we will be hearing of circulars reminding cadres not to sexually harass or molest their subordinates.
In expensive urban neighborhoods, bathhouses, teahouses and karaoke bars are among the few properties not yet superseded by real estate brokerages and branded shops, attesting to their amazing and durable profitability.
Some explanations are needed here. Cadres do not visit bathhouses, teahouses, and karaoke bars just to clean up, drink, or sing.
Bathouses have long been a fashionable way to socialize. One of my colleagues from Yangzhou was once invited to a local bathhouse there by one of his relatives and was truly impressed to see so many uniformly robed males and females sitting at mahjong tables.
That's a more or less innocuous extension of what bathouses are supposed to do. But these facilities in expensive environs derive their chief revenue from services euphemized as massage.
Thus, I am all in support of the aforementioned campaign against using the public's time to seek pleasure.
"This campaign will bring about a change in the cadres' perception of what's right and what's wrong," an expert from Shanxi Party School was quoted as commenting.
It also indicates the gap between what our civil servants claim to serve, and what they actually serve.
For too long there have been Party calls to bury ideological differences to concentrate on the central task of economic development.
That is based on the assumption that ultimately economic growth benefits all, that the wealth of the few trickles down to the many.
That does not happen, and we doubt if it ever will.
Economic growth is increasingly perceived by some as the accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of a relative few.
The centrality of the economy dictates a corresponding shift in the governmental role.
In economically robust areas like the east coast, the chief role of government has become that of serving economic development by attracting investment.
Many governments are busy taking over lands from the people and granting them to the highest bidding developers.
The Economic Observer newspaper reported recently how in Shuyang County in Jiangsu Province, an underdeveloped region, attracting investment has become a mass movement.
The amount of investment introduced is directly pegged to officials' promotion and career. Local officials are told to bear in mind that "drawing investment can only be climactic, not anticlimactic. It is the life line, the first mission, and prime political asset."
This is a desperate move to catch up in GDP. In Jiangsu's GDP rankings for 2009, Shuyang was ranked the fourth from the provincial bottom.
People vs capital
Serving the people remains a slogan, but serving mammon is the mandate.
This week a message board has been launched at the People's Daily website whereby ordinary netizens can address their top concerns to the top leadership.
Not surprisingly, nearly a third of the messages concern soaring home prices. They are rising despite the latest round of efforts at reining in the sky-high prices and the soaring prices and transaction numbers in major cities threaten to undercut government efforts to cool the market.
The measures are generally said to be the most stringent so far, and their failure is a dismal reflection of the popular distrust of any stated government intention to rationalize the housing market.
As a matter of fact, even at the current price levels, the government controls are still aimed at "stabilizing" prices, rather than depressing them.
Spokesman Sheng Laiyun from the National Bureau of Statistics already sounds self-congratulatory.
According to Sheng, the effect of control measures in the real estate sector is already "fairly evident."
Past failures to cool the market suggest only one thing: the government is firmly behind big capital in this test of wills between real estate developers and home buyers.
When the central government gives local government the wrong incentives and priorities, we see tragedies.
Redefining role
In recent years there have been a spate of suicides due to forced relocations from government-appropriated lands, but since virtually nothing has been done to discourage local governments from their brutal land seizures, we are hearing more of such desperate actions.
The latest occurred on September 10 in Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province, when three residents resorted to self-immolation to protest against having their three-story home pulled down.
The three victims are still in critical condition.
Local officials refuse to accept any blame, saying the victims ignited by themselves "by accident."
But one victim has recorded with her mobile phone how residents had been threatened before the tragedy:
"We have already torn down the home of Zhou Guohong, who is so well-connected and powerful. You have no choice but to comply!"
"If you refuse to pull down today, you will have no idea how your life will end tomorrow!"
Fuzhou experienced serious flooding in June, but a brutal government is worse than flooding.
Only when the highest authority has spelled out the mission for local governments can we hope to see less confusion below.
Seventy-nine men have been punished and the other 217 may be disciplined soon. After the roundup, local authorities issued a circular prohibiting cadres from using office hours to get a massage, gamble, play cards, mahjong, chess or computer games.
I guess that soon we will be hearing of circulars reminding cadres not to sexually harass or molest their subordinates.
In expensive urban neighborhoods, bathhouses, teahouses and karaoke bars are among the few properties not yet superseded by real estate brokerages and branded shops, attesting to their amazing and durable profitability.
Some explanations are needed here. Cadres do not visit bathhouses, teahouses, and karaoke bars just to clean up, drink, or sing.
Bathouses have long been a fashionable way to socialize. One of my colleagues from Yangzhou was once invited to a local bathhouse there by one of his relatives and was truly impressed to see so many uniformly robed males and females sitting at mahjong tables.
That's a more or less innocuous extension of what bathouses are supposed to do. But these facilities in expensive environs derive their chief revenue from services euphemized as massage.
Thus, I am all in support of the aforementioned campaign against using the public's time to seek pleasure.
"This campaign will bring about a change in the cadres' perception of what's right and what's wrong," an expert from Shanxi Party School was quoted as commenting.
It also indicates the gap between what our civil servants claim to serve, and what they actually serve.
For too long there have been Party calls to bury ideological differences to concentrate on the central task of economic development.
That is based on the assumption that ultimately economic growth benefits all, that the wealth of the few trickles down to the many.
That does not happen, and we doubt if it ever will.
Economic growth is increasingly perceived by some as the accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of a relative few.
The centrality of the economy dictates a corresponding shift in the governmental role.
In economically robust areas like the east coast, the chief role of government has become that of serving economic development by attracting investment.
Many governments are busy taking over lands from the people and granting them to the highest bidding developers.
The Economic Observer newspaper reported recently how in Shuyang County in Jiangsu Province, an underdeveloped region, attracting investment has become a mass movement.
The amount of investment introduced is directly pegged to officials' promotion and career. Local officials are told to bear in mind that "drawing investment can only be climactic, not anticlimactic. It is the life line, the first mission, and prime political asset."
This is a desperate move to catch up in GDP. In Jiangsu's GDP rankings for 2009, Shuyang was ranked the fourth from the provincial bottom.
People vs capital
Serving the people remains a slogan, but serving mammon is the mandate.
This week a message board has been launched at the People's Daily website whereby ordinary netizens can address their top concerns to the top leadership.
Not surprisingly, nearly a third of the messages concern soaring home prices. They are rising despite the latest round of efforts at reining in the sky-high prices and the soaring prices and transaction numbers in major cities threaten to undercut government efforts to cool the market.
The measures are generally said to be the most stringent so far, and their failure is a dismal reflection of the popular distrust of any stated government intention to rationalize the housing market.
As a matter of fact, even at the current price levels, the government controls are still aimed at "stabilizing" prices, rather than depressing them.
Spokesman Sheng Laiyun from the National Bureau of Statistics already sounds self-congratulatory.
According to Sheng, the effect of control measures in the real estate sector is already "fairly evident."
Past failures to cool the market suggest only one thing: the government is firmly behind big capital in this test of wills between real estate developers and home buyers.
When the central government gives local government the wrong incentives and priorities, we see tragedies.
Redefining role
In recent years there have been a spate of suicides due to forced relocations from government-appropriated lands, but since virtually nothing has been done to discourage local governments from their brutal land seizures, we are hearing more of such desperate actions.
The latest occurred on September 10 in Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province, when three residents resorted to self-immolation to protest against having their three-story home pulled down.
The three victims are still in critical condition.
Local officials refuse to accept any blame, saying the victims ignited by themselves "by accident."
But one victim has recorded with her mobile phone how residents had been threatened before the tragedy:
"We have already torn down the home of Zhou Guohong, who is so well-connected and powerful. You have no choice but to comply!"
"If you refuse to pull down today, you will have no idea how your life will end tomorrow!"
Fuzhou experienced serious flooding in June, but a brutal government is worse than flooding.
Only when the highest authority has spelled out the mission for local governments can we hope to see less confusion below.
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