Eternal vigilance price of good governance

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By Xiong Lei (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-18 07:31

While I have been inclined to believe that bureaucracy at certain levels in certain places is hopeless, I felt encouraged to see that following the Sichuan earthquake, the government on the whole is becoming more responsive to requests and complaints from ordinary people.

And a personal experience of mine bears evidence of this progress.

It was in late May when I learned from a friend in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, that at some villages in the quake-hit areas, where ethnic minorities live alongside Han people, a few Han village heads who had been domineering were not just in distributing the relief goods.

In one village, the tents were allegedly withheld for days by the head, who would not give any explanation to the villagers. Some minority people felt they were discriminated against.

It seems that there was difficulty for the minority villagers to communicate with the village head and they instead complained to their relatives and friends, or grieved among themselves.

My Chengdu friend learned about this and worried. We were clear that if the problem did exist and was not solved soon enough, the grievances could swell to anger and eventually result in some real crisis.

Yet the place denied accessibility since the quake had destroyed the highways to the county where the village is located, and the region, though struck by the quake, was not among those hot spots that drew the media's attention.

We were not able to check the facts personally. But what if the reality supported the complaints?

We decided to put up our worries and pleas in our blogs. In our writings we noted that we were told at some places in the quake-stricken areas, especially places invisible to the news media, the principle of giving priority to ordinary people over officials in distributing relief goods was not carried out to the letter.

We pleaded with the provincial leaders of Sichuan that in areas where ethnic minorities live together with the Hans, another principle should be applied, which is to give priority to ethnic minorities over Han people in distributing relief goods.

And we suggested that representatives of ethnic minorities be involved in overseeing the distribution, guaranteeing the justice and equity of its operation, while Han officials should check their working style.

These writings could be lost among millions of writings put up online everyday and we were pretty sure they might not draw the attention we expected. So I urged my friends to try the national hotline for the discipline watchdog 12388 - to both the Central and Sichuan Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China.

For the latter one, you needed to add the area code 028 if you dialed from elsewhere than Sichuan.

The hotline was really hot: I kept dialing for over two hours before I finally got through.

In my case, I was not asked to identify myself on the hotline, but I did give the information of the village. I told the receiver that I knew at normal times a village might not be on their work agenda, but this was not a normal time and the issue was not a minor one.

As I was wondering if these complaint calls could make any impact and if we should reach some deputies to local and national People's Congress to get our pleas heard, I learned from my Chengdu friend that a working group had been dispatched to the village the day after we had called the hotlines. Now the withheld tents and other relief goods had been distributed to the ethnic minority villagers.

What the local government has done might still have a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, this swift response is a gratifying sign of progress in governance.

This experience taught me that when there is injustice we the people can use legal means available to us to get the government addressing the problem.

Yes, there is the bureaucratic mindset among some government officials, whose inertia and indifference to people's pains could be horrible. But passive accusations and grieving among ourselves are no way to solve the problem.

The central government does have good policies and principles for officials at various levels to go among the people and get close to them, especially after the quake. But these policies and principles will remain simply paper work if we do not put them into good use.

The bureaucracy often erodes people's trust and confidence in the government. But we cannot wait for the government at various levels to automatically change their working style and do away with bureaucracy. We have our share of duties to make the government responsive to our requests.

When the government is responsive, people's supervision over the government's work is no longer empty talk, and good governance is possible.

The author is a council member of China Society for Human Rights Studies

(China Daily 07/18/2008 page8)