China’s New Leaders Plan First Government Overhaul in Five Years

By Bloomberg News 

The new leaders of China’s Communist Party will this week discuss plans to restructure ministries and state institutions, paving the way for the first overhaul of the central government in five years.

The Party’s ruling Politburo met yesterday and endorsed draft reforms to the State Council to be discussed by the Central Committee -- a broader group of top officials -- when it meets Feb. 26-28, Xinhua News Agency reported. It didn’t provide further details.

The changes will be approved by the nation’s legislature when it meets in March for an annual session that will see Li Keqiang, the party’s No. 2, succeed Wen Jiabao as premier and General Secretary Xi Jinping take over from Hu Jintao as president. The state-run news agency said Politburo members agreed reform should be carried out in an “active yet prudent, step by step manner,” suggesting any changes won’t be radical.

“Whenever a new leadership takes over, they try to push forward with government restructuring but it’s very difficult because everyone is vying for power and no one wants to give it up,” said Ding Xueliang, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who teaches contemporary Chinese politics. “Xi and Li may only be able to push through a watered-down version of what they want.”

Food Safety

The scandal-hit Ministry of Railways will be merged into the Ministry of Transport, while the Ministry of Civil Affairs may widen its responsibilities over social management, Caijing magazine reported yesterday. The changes will also include nationwide reform of food safety and more responsibility for the State Oceanic Administration, according to a report on the magazine’s website.

New York-based Duowei News, which accurately predicted in July that the Politburo Standing Committee would be reduced to seven from nine members, said in a Feb. 21 report on its website that the transport ministry will take over responsibility for railway construction and network planning, while the railway ministry’s operational units will be separated into a new company.

“Participants vowed to attach greater importance to the transformation of government functions,” Xinhua said. “They said more efforts should be made to improve administrative efficiency and the socialist market economic system.”

Vested Interests

While the Party has been trying to streamline ministries for years, those “around transport and finance have proved very hard nuts to crack as they involve significant vested interests,” said Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat in Beijing who is now a professor at the University of Sydney. If the reforms go ahead, that might be a “sign that this new leadership know their task now is to produce economic growth through efficiency and not just raw economic activity, and the system as it is will impede that.”

The overhaul to be announced at the National People’s Congress next month is part of institutional reform that’s been unveiled about every five years since the early 1980s. The Communist Party has been attempting to adapt the bureaucracy to the changing structure of the economy as it moved from a system based on central planning to one driven by the market.

Changes introduced in 2008 involved the setting up of five new so-called super ministries: the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security; the Ministry of Environmental Protection; the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction; and the Ministry of Transport. A National Energy Administration was also set up under the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning body.

New Regulators

Reform in 2003 included the formation of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which oversees central state-owned enterprises, and the banking regulator.

China needs new institutional reforms to support growth, former central bank adviser Li Daokuisaid at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, in September. “Dividends” from previous institutional reforms are running out, he said.

Yesterday’s Politburo meeting also discussed a list of candidates for the new government that will be recommended to the National People’s Congress and for the leadership of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Xinhua said.

The CPPCC annual meeting will start on March 3 and the NPC will begin on March 5.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Helen Sun in Shanghai athsun30@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net

source

please give me comments thanks