More power devolved to counties
- Source: Global Times
- [08:10 June 24 2009]
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By Liang Chen
As Chinese media intensively covers the local governing structure reform, a professor of the CPC Party School claimed yesterday the move would stimulate grass-root officials’ enthusiasm to boost economic development and increase government efficiency.
China’s local governing structure is undergoing significant changes, with 20 provinces recently carrying out a pilot reform of “province governing county,” aiming to retain the central government’s control over the grass-root level.
As of this month, 818 counties in 24 provinces have carried out the pilot reform, a quarter of the total number of counties in the country, according to Zhang Zhanbin, deputy director of the Economics Department at China’s National School of Administration.
Counties had been directly governed by provincial officials since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. However, the power over counties had been devolved to officials at the city level after China began to adopt reform and opening-up at the end of the 1970s.
With the “province governing county” reform, provincial governments will have direct control of counties in affairs including personnel, finance and projects, with city-level officials losing much of their control over counties. The structure will be less complex, consisting only of three layers; central, provincial and county.
The system of “city governing county” played a big role in urbanization during the early stages of China’s reform and opening-up period.
However, with the development of the counties, serious problems arose, including low work efficiency. Counties have been complaining of being exploited by cities, and that the interests of rural areas are neglected, Xinhua reported.
One exception, Hainan Province, has never delegated its control over counties to the hands of city-level officials, and it sees less of the above complaints.
Zhang said that the reform can be divided into three steps. In the first phase, a number of counties will be designated as experimental areas and only respond to the direct supervision of provincial governments. Then, all the counties will be granted the same status as cities. Such reforms will be applied to districts under cities.
Referring to the meaning of the reform, Fu Siming, vice director of the Politics and Law Department at the CPC Party School, said the essence is to protect the rights of farmers and alleviate the contradictions of rural and urban development and maintain social stability.
“It will greatly encourage rural development, and meet the needs of hundreds of millions of farmers and boost agricultural development, the base on which to ensure the overall stability and development of China,” Fu told the Global Times.
The central government has attached great importance to the cultivation of grass-roots officials, with over 600,000 secretaries of village party branches and more than 2,000 secretaries of county committees having been trained in the provinces or in Beijing.
Zhang Han contributed to this story