里约跨栏冠军:Why China's central and local dovernment disc...

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/04/28 09:16:10

Why China's central and local dovernment disconnect?

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2011-6-24 10:08



Last month, a businessman set off three explosions in a town in Jiangxi, killing himself and two others, after trying unsuccessfully for years to obtain reasonable compensation for the destruction of his home for a highway that was never built. The suicide bombing dramatized the distress that arbitrary land seizures by local governments continue to cause many farmers.


Such extreme protest reflects a serious systemic problem in China’s governance: Underfunded local governments frequently dilute and undercut implementation of national laws and policies in their effort to sustain growth and increase local revenues. Some examples of the consequences of this practice include not only illegal expropriation of land, but also tolerance of violations of laws on product safety, intellectual property rights (IPR) and protection of the environment. There is a frequent disconnect between local governments and Beijing that is aggravated by the center’s underfunding of local governments.


Local governments have been lax in enforcing food safety laws for similar reasons. Violations are widespread, according to frequent reports in the Chinese media. One recent article told of pork bought in Changsha stores so loaded with bacteria that it glowed in the dark. Another report told of acres of watermelons exploding in Jiangsu province because farmers were over-spraying melons with a growth-promoting chemical, hoping to put them on the market ahead of the peak season and increase their profits. The China Daily recently quoted a lawyer who said that local food safety watchdogs were unwilling to punish violators heavily or close them down because they did not want to be deprived of the income that supervisory bureaus earn from fines and charges on illegal behavior.


In response to inadequate supervision by food monitoring agencies, Beijing has announced that the efforts of local governments to ensure food safety will be more closely scrutinized by the central government, and officials will be rewarded for their efforts or sanctioned for their failures; Beijing, Shanghai and several provinces have already adopted such a responsibility system. A professor of administrative law was quoted as saying “local governments should follow the central government’s orders.” It is a measure of the extent of the problem that this truism was uttered seriously.


As helpful as foreign assistance might be, only China’s central government can initiate steps to address the problems discussed here. Some observers have urged that Beijing must transfer additional revenue to local governments to alleviate what one American scholar has called their “fiscal starvation.” The study of fiscal transfers cited above (Liu, et al.), however, suggests that they do not prevent diversion away from their intended purpose and that “more fundamental institutional reforms” are needed. The Chinese government continues to face the enormous task of strengthening local government adherence to national policies that are designed to benefit China’s citizens – but that can affect the rest of the world as well.
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