Guangdong's Challenges

I n his report delivered at the Fifteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on 12 September 1997, Jiang Zemin severely criticized the over-expansion of the administrative bureaucracy in China. Jiang stated: Unwieldy organization, over-staffing, failure to separate the functions of the government from those of enterprises and serious bureaucratism directly hamper the deepening of reforms and economic development and impair the relationship between the Party and the masses.' The Chinese leadership therefore asks that the functions of the government be altered and separated from those of enterprises, allowing the latter be given genuine powers regarding production, operation and management. Jiang put forward the principles of simplification, uniformity and efficiency, and demanded that departments in charge of comprehensive economic management should shift their functions to macroeconomic control, while specialized economic departments should be reorganized or reduced.2 This organizational streamlining started at the central government level and would then be extended to the local level. Local government reform would follow the design of the State Council. It was scheduled that the central government would complete its restructuring by the end of 1998, and provincial government reform would begin in 1999. It was reported that leaders of the industrial provinces in the Northeast requested to have the reforms postponed, but the governor of Guangdong, Lu Ruihua, claimed that Guangdong had enoughjobs to relocate government cadres. Lu believed

Business · Economic policy · Economic system · Economics · Political science · Restructuring · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Economic Zones and Regional Development · Finance

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