Officials don't usually get so much attention from the press when they retire. But as Zhang Baoqing, the former vice-minister of education, left his office for the last time, he was given the celebrity treatment by the Chinese-language press for revealing that policies from Zhongnanhai the compound of the central government are often ignored by local officials.

There was actually nothing new in what he said. That Zhongnanhai's orders do not travel beyond its walls is an old saying in Beijing. People heard it from the 1990s.

Differences between central and local governments are not necessarily a bad thing. When differences occur and there is corruption, be it at the local or central level, all China has to do is to have the alleged law-breakers arrested and sent for trial. However, where central and local officials do not share the same priorities, blaming one side does not build a consensus or solve the problem.

The fact is that there can be new opportunities for reform wherever central and local governments work together to identify problems and find solutions.

Throughout the 1990s, there were plenty of individuals including scholars in the West who had never lived in China saying China was falling apart because of growing tension in its central/local government relations.

As it turned out, these differences neither reflected Beijing's inadequate ties with local governments nor signalled those local governments' readiness to break away from the former's orbit. The prophets of doom of the 1990s have failed to appreciate this society's inherent strengths.

In former vice-minister Zhang's case, he might have a legitimate reason to fly into a temper, as he was criticizing local officials who had turned a deaf ear to Beijing's requirement for student loans. But it is not always so black and white.

Many of the reforms were launched on the local level, with no approval from central government. But they were a good effort and injected fresh ideas and experience into the old way of doing things.

For instance, last week the Chinese press carried obituaries for Ren Zhongyi, a former leader of Guangdong Province in South China. He was the first man in China to liberalize grocery prices and risk being accused of copying the capitalist market economy at a time when food was still under the rigid ration system in the rest of the country.

In reality, China's first private farms, first privately-owned factories, first joint-stock companies, first stock exchanges, and first privately-owned schools were all local efforts. The same was true of many companies. But when they became successful they were recognized as pilot reform projects.

Without those initiatives outside Zhongnanhai's walls, any change would entirely be powered by the central government in finance and human resources, in ideas and in plans. The cost of Chinese reform would have become formidable. China's success story today is to a large extent the result of initiatives at both the central and local levels.

Understandably, whenever progress does not come along in an orderly way, and whenever local initiatives appear too crude, officials in the central government start accusing their local counterparts of narrow-mindedness and incompetence.

But in the end, they and their local counterparts will have to work together again. So perhaps the most important thing central government officials can do is to design a large framework in which Zhongnanhai's orders and local initiatives are balanced.

In the development of education we may be seeing some encouraging signs of such a balance. The sector has for a long time been a centralized monopoly, like the Chinese railway service was. But on November 18, an educational joint venture was launched in Zhuhai, a southern coastal city, by the Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong's Baptist University. This is yet another local initiative, in an area where changes are never thought to be easy.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/21/2005 page4)