Published: January 25, 2010
BEIJING — Addressing a facet of political life all too familiar to Americans, China’s government is reported to have ordered the closure of thousands of “regional liaison offices” — in essence, lobbying firms — that local governments and companies operate in Beijing to curry favor with high officials.
Echoing another facet of political life all too familiar to Americans, not everyone is convinced that the effort will succeed.
The government-affiliated magazine Outlook Weekly reported that Beijing officials have vowed to shutter the liaison offices within six months in an effort to stanch what some analysts call a culture of unalloyed corruption surrounding the institutions.
Liaison offices recently were featured in less-than-flattering light after it was reported that two local governments from Henan Province last February spent more than $96,000 to buy 777 bottles of expensive Chinese liquor to entertain high officials.
That is but the latest in a string of scandals surrounding the offices, which have produced a number of indictments in recent years on charges including bribery and embezzlement.
Chinese wags often refer to the liaison offices as “pao bu, xing jin,” which ostensibly means “run forward,” but also can be translated as “go to the ministry and give money.”
By some calculations, Beijing boasts more than 5,500 local-government provincial offices, and perhaps 5,000 more offices representing state-run corporations, associations and other entities.
The provincial-level offices alone employ close to 8,000 workers, housed in impressive bureaus designed to convey the power and prestige of the areas they represent.
The central government directive would close the offices of state-run firms and governments at or below the county level. The survivors, Outlook said, would be strictly regulated.
But the central government could be in for a fight. “This is serious,” Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of central government affairs, said in a telephone interview on Monday. “These offices are strong symbols of provincial sovereignty, and by seeking to shut them down, the central government is trying to keep regional officials from lobbying too hard for local interests.”
China’s leaders have used increasingly dire language in recent years to inveigh against government corruption, which they liken to a disease that is eroding the strength of Communist governance. Local government corruption is a common subject of attack by local journalists and internet surfers. But with some exceptions, higher-level corruption has largely been excluded from government campaigns.
The South China Morning Post, a Hong-Kong based newspaper, stated Monday that Beijing is awash in liaison offices because state power is so concentrated that virtually anyone seeking influence needs a representative in the national capital.
“In a democratic country, there is a fairly transparent regime in place to decide where a government project goes and how much expenditure it will receive, even with some lobbying,” Ren Jianming , deputy director of Tsinghua University’s Anticorruption and Governance Research Center, was quoted as saying. “But in China, it often comes down to networking and even some shady ways to court higher authorities. So the liaison offices are indispensable in this sense.”
But the success of the government directive is anything but guaranteed. The Outlook article noted that China’s central government has been talking since at least 2006 about reining in the offices, with little success.
One problem is that the offices represent China’s provinces, which are also represented on the nation’s principal governing body, the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Provincial officials at the national level are hardly enthusiastic about curtailing the power of officials in their home regions.
Xiyun Yang and Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.
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