Opinion: Bureaucratic restructuring - power is the key

2) All of the entities created will be state-owned enterprises under the direct control of the central government authorities. This means there will be more government interference in rail commerce, not less.

3) Even with years of planning, the structuring of this vast new commercial enterprise would have been a difficult task. However, no advance notice of the plan was provided and no advance planning was made. The reason for this is simple. Since the decision was about power rather than about economic efficiency, the process was kept secret and the decision was announced before planning of any kind. Advance planning would have allowed the enemy to prepare a defence. The enemy in this case was very powerful, so avoiding a defence was essential. The result is massive uncertainty at every level of China's vast railway system. Uncertainty means by definition a decrease in efficiency, not an increase. This is especially true in the Chinese bureaucracy, where uncertainty results in no action on the part of the bureaucrats. The entire system then has a tendency to freeze up, with predictable adverse consequences.

We can take two additional examples with similar effects. First, consider the restructuring of the food and drug system. The Chinese food and drug system has been under pressure for a number of years. The issues regarding food and drug safety are well known. Financial corruption resulting from drug and medical device approval and regulation has reached scandalous proportions. These issues affect every Chinese citizen, and the general impression in China is that the situation has grown worse over the past five years, in spite of numerous claims by the government that improvements would be made.

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Merging creates disorganisation

Consider then what actually has happened. The State Food and Drug Administration has been upgraded in status, resulting in a name change to the China Food and Drug Administration. Supervision over food safety that had been spread over at least three agencies has been consolidated into this new agency. But what has been the effect? As with the Railway Ministry, this change was announced before any planning was made for the change.

In this case, numerous officials from entirely unrelated agencies were suddenly yanked from their traditional system of management and control and placed under the direction of new masters. This shift is difficult in any bureaucratic system, but is almost impossible to achieve in the Chinese world of bureaucratic patronage. The predictable result is not efficiency. The result is chaos and uncertainty. For now, it is not clear who is in charge in the newly named agency. In particular, it is not clear how these food safety functions will be incorporated into the current structure of the food and drug bureaucracy. The result is not a resolute effort on the part of the bureaucrats to resolve the issues. The result is instead inaction. No one knows what to do, so no one does anything.

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Bringing back control

Second, consider the merger of the film and print media regulators into a single new agency, the General Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television. The issue here was centred on control. During the Hu Jintao era, the centre grew concerned with two issues concerning these agencies. The first was the tendency of these agencies to view their operations as commercial in nature. That is, these agencies began to focus on maximising income from film, television and other media businesses. This conflicted with the goal of the centre that media be controlled solely for propaganda purposes. The second concern was with the attempt by these agencies to turn themselves into independent centres of power by manipulating public opinion for the purpose of promoting one or the other of the many factions that contend for power in China.

The goal of this merger has nothing to do with efficiency. The goal is to bring the propaganda regulators back under the direct control of the centre. The plan is to make clear that the goal of regulation is for control of media content, not for commercial purposes. This control is for the purpose of meeting the goals of the central government, not for the independent, personal goals of the media regulators themselves.

In this case, the centre seems to have made some progress in achieving its goal. Almost immediately after the announced change, the media regulators began to take a more consistent non-commercial approach to regulation. For example, control over Weibo and other messaging systems has increased. Foreign films have been further restricted, with the recent revocation of the right to showing the film Django being the most famous example. Pressure for content control for newspapers and television programming has also increased.

This more successful example demonstrates my point. The restructuring has nothing to do with the commercial efficiency of the Chinese regulatory system. Rather, the restructuring is purely concerned with increasing the power of the central government (that is, the CPC Politburo Standing Committee) over government agencies that have sought to become independent centres of power or that have strayed from the strict dictates of central government ideology.

The goal of the restructuring is intended to make the central government more efficient in its interference with commercial enterprises in China. Where the restructuring is successful, the result is more effective interference in support of the centre. Where the restructuring is not successful, the result is uncertainty and bureaucratic inaction, leading to an inability for businesses to conduct their operations. In either case, the entire process shows that the goal of the government is increased direct control over the Chinese economy. This restructuring is not evidence of a desire to move towards an improvement of the market economy in China. It is evidence of the opposite goal. It is evidence of the desire of the centre to more effectively and completely control all aspects of the Chinese economy. Views of the success or failure of the process should not distract us from understanding what the ultimate goal is.

Steven Dickinson, Harris Moure, Seattle