Governing for the people

Further reforms will maintain modernization momentum and create a fairer society, earning China more respect from others

The past decade has witnessed many cases of corruption and unjust law enforcement, which have resulted in a host of social problems in China. To surmount these difficulties, the key for the Communist Party of China, the governing party, is to truly govern for the people.

Against this backdrop, the unprecedented strength of commitment and intensity of efforts to fight corruption and deepen reform on multiple fronts have been encouraging.

The campaign against corruption acquired formidable momentum last year and even more so for the efforts to curb official extravagance. For example, until recently, officials were enjoying excessive office space, now it is set at 55 square meters for minister level officials and 40 sq m for vice-minister-level ones.

The wasting of public money on receptions and study tours has also been clamped down on. A local government delegation spent four days on a study tour in another city, although they only had a half-day meeting for official business. As a consequence, the entire department was subject to disciplinary action with everyone in the delegation ordered to foot their own bills for the trip. Now officials at or below the level of director-general must travel economy class, while mayors from cities at the prefecture level must stay in standard rooms instead of suites as was the previous custom.

Such explicit rules on officials' spending and their implementation are being constantly checked.

Party leader Xi Jinping has identified building a modern governance system with commensurate capabilities as the master objective for comprehensively deepening reforms, and emphasized the necessity of emancipating both minds and productivity (In China, the most important thing when it comes to development is to make the pie bigger). In addition, he has stressed the need to adopt the right approach to reform, one that is market-driven competing with the one that is government-led.

This means allowing the market to play a decisive role in the allocation of resources while the government becomes the rule-maker ensuring a level playing field instead of giving the nod of approval to everything. State-owned enterprises will thus need to work as hard as their private counterparts, thus enabling the latter to pursue better growth while pushing the former to make more changes under increasingly competitive pressure.