The former vice president of the Central Party School summarizes the three laws of Chinese officialdom
The first law
The poorer the place, the more people want to be officials
If we observe the phenomenon, it is not difficult for people to find a fact: the poorer the place, the more people want to be officials.
For example, the economy in the north is not as developed as that in the south, so the northerners prefer to be an official than the southerners; the inland economy is not as good as that of the coast, and the inland people prefer to be an official than the coastal people; the Chinese economy lags behind the United States, so the Chinese generally prefer to be an official than the Americans.
In recent years, there have been incidents of buying officials in China that have been exposed in the media, and many people have been dismissed from office and sentenced to prison.
If the reader is careful, pay attention to the location of the crime. This kind of case almost happened in a poor province or a poor area in a developed province.
Why are there so many officials in poverty-stricken areas?
The explanation of economics is: economic human nature under certain limited conditions.
Economics talks about economic man, which has two meanings: one is that people are rational; the other is that people are selfish. Since people are selfish, they must pursue the maximization of their own interests; since people are rational, they must seek ways to maximize their interests under limited conditions.
For example, in poor areas, people have low income, no capital to invest, and no market to do business. So if you want to improve yourself, you have to get involved with the government.
Because in these places, the proportion of the state-owned economy is high, and the state-owned economy is managed by the government. It depends on the mountains and the water. If you don’t enter the government’s door, you can’t become a member of the government. There is no job for you on the government’s table. Nothing to do with you.
I once heard a joke told by a friend. It is said that during the Spring Festival, a migrant worker from Sichuan went south to work. Due to the crowd, he accidentally broke the glass on the train. The train conductor asked him to pay. He said that the train belongs to the state, and the state-owned assets belong to the whole people, and I also have a share. I don’t want anything from the state, except for this piece of glass. But the train conductor said, this piece of glass is not yours, and you have to pay for it if it is broken.
Whether this is true or not, the author has no way of investigating, but it at least illustrates a truth. State-owned assets are said to be the assets of the whole people, but ordinary people have no control over them.
The state-owned economy is actually a government-owned economy, and everything owned by the government is controlled by officials.
Imagine, if it was not the migrant worker who broke the glass, but a certain director of the railway department, would the train conductor let him pay?
Perhaps the conductor of the train explained that the migrant workers took the train for personal reasons, and the director took the train for business.
Since doing business is a privilege, you don’t have to pay for damages, who would not want to do it?
Therefore, people in poor areas want to become officials, mostly because they understand the special relationship between being an official and the state-owned economy.
If people want to survive, they have to eat every day. People depend on food!
Don’t look at eating as a trivial matter, but whether you are an official or not, the way you eat is very different.
When ordinary people go to restaurants to eat, they must pay for it themselves, but officials who eat a big meal usually take the invoice and go back to the unit for reimbursement.
Once I accompanied a domestic delegation to visit the United States. After the meal, we asked the restaurant waiter to ask for a receipt, but the waiter didn’t know what the receipt was. When they found the boss, we explained to him that we had dinner with you , To issue an invoice to go back to the country for reimbursement, the restaurant owner was puzzled. He asked: Aren’t you eating for yourself? Why do you have to pay for it?
Obviously foreigners don’t understand China’s national conditions. In our China, ordinary people eat for themselves. Once they become officials, they become state cadres. They eat for the country, so the state has to pay for it.
Not only for eating, but also for driving. Ordinary people have to pay for the bus when they go out; ordinary cadres can ask their units to send cars, and senior officials can have special cars.
In short, as long as you become an official, you can pay for things like eating and traveling by the public. Focusing on this point, do you think there are not many people in poor areas who want to be officials?
Nowadays, people want to make a windfall, there are two ways: one is illegal operation, such as smuggling and drug trafficking; the other is administrative monopoly, using power for personal gain.
The first method, although there are huge profits, is also a big risk. If there is a mistake, it will lose both people and money. This kind of head-losing thing cannot be done by anyone who has the guts of tigers and leopards; but administrative monopoly is different, with great power in hand, calling the wind and calling the rain, and earning money to do it grandiosely.
Just like in the past when the price was dual-tracked, the price difference between inside and outside was used for profit, and I don’t know how many people have been fattened up.
In the past few years, there were quite a few people who got rich overnight by relying on land approval and reverse approval documents.
The common people call these people “official downfalls”, why is it called “official downfalls”? Because such a business as granting land and reversing approval documents, without an official position and no power in the hands, it will definitely fail.
That’s why some people in poverty-stricken areas say: If you want to get rich, you must become a cadre, don’t farm land or raise cattle, and become an upstart with a stroke of a pen.
Since being a sensuality generates profit out of nothing, everyone sees it in their eyes and understands it in their hearts.
Especially in poor areas, people have no way to get rich, but if they are poor, they want to change. Therefore, it is reasonable for thousands of troops to crowd the official road.
The second law
The greater the real power, the harder it is to become a high official
Anyone who is an official will have power, but the position is different, and the power can be divided into reality and reality. Some have high positions and false powers, while others have low positions and real powers.
For example, the director of the same agency, some people are in charge of money, property and people, while others are only responsible for uploading and distributing documents. If it is a different department, it is common for the director to have more power than the section chief. Of course, the real power mentioned here refers specifically to financial power, property rights, and personnel rights.
The laws of economic research must be extracted from general facts. Generally speaking, there is indeed such a phenomenon in the officialdom, that is, those who have great power when they are young often find it difficult to become a high-ranking official.
why? The second assumption in economics is the resource scarcity assumption.
From an economic point of view, real power is also a scarce resource, and the greater the real power, the more scarce it is.
What is scarce in the market, many people want it. In the jargon, it’s called demand exceeds supply.
Since there is less supply and more demand, the competition is naturally much fiercer than that of ordinary positions.
So when an official has real power, there will be people thinking about it, some envious, some jealous, some begging you, some hating you, and many of them want to replace you.
Therefore, for those who hold real power, unless you make steel and cast iron, watertight, otherwise, if you are a little careless, you will be calculated by others, and the boat will capsize in the gutter.
If there are any troubles in the work and someone catches them, not only will there be no hope of promotion, but even the current position will be in danger, and the days will not be long.
There is another explanation in economics for the phenomenon that the greater the real power, it is usually difficult to become a high-ranking official: it is the failure of democracy. The choice in the political market usually follows the majority rule.
For example, to elect someone to be the head of the department, there must be a majority of people in favor. Theoretically speaking, “majority pass” is justifiable, and it is many times stronger than a single person messing up the mandarin ducks.
But the difficulty lies in, what is “majority pass”? Economics talks about the majority, which has at least two meanings: the majority of the minority and the majority of the majority.
Still taking the selection of directors as an example, if it is decided by three directors (one chief and two deputy), then the “majority” is two people; if it is elected by the entire agency, the “majority” may be dozens or even hundreds of people.
You must know that the selection of directors and general cadres will have different angles. The division chief elected by the bureau chief may not be the same person as the division chief elected by ordinary cadres.
If the choice of the bureau chiefs prevails, although it is passed by the majority, the result does not represent the will of the majority in the overall situation, so democracy fails here.
It is this kind of selection by a small number of people that makes it difficult for young cadres who hold real power to become high-ranking officials. Assume that a certain director is in charge of project contracting.
Project contracting is something that many people covet, and naturally many want to get involved. In this way, those who are older than the director may write a note to introduce the engineering team to the director.
For a project in the hands of the director, maybe 20 notes will be collected, so there are too many monks and too little food, what should I do?
It’s hard for a clever woman to cook without rice, so the director can only weigh the strengths and contract the project to the engineering team introduced by an important leader.
However, the director flattered one leader, but offended 19 superiors. When a meeting is held to study his promotion in the future, one person agrees and 19 people oppose it. People can imagine what the result will be.
Also, those officials who write notes, what about those who have no officials? If you want to pick up the project, you have to send a ticket. Even if the director did not accept gifts, 100 people gave money, but 99 were rejected, and one of them was introduced by the mother-in-law, so he accepted it.
Unexpectedly, the Dongchuang incident was revealed, and the result was reported to the Disciplinary Inspection Commission. The discipline inspection department handles the case not by how many times you refuse bribes, but by whether you have ever accepted bribes. It is a one-vote veto.
Even if it is just once, those who should be dismissed must be dismissed, and those who should be punished must be dealt with legally. Law and discipline are ruthless. Therefore, when a young cadre with real power becomes a high-ranking official, the probability of success is only 1%, while the probability of failure is 99%.
If readers don’t believe me, you can look at the officials you know. Are many of those well-versed in official careers from the Communist Youth League, or those who had little real power when they were young.
Why do cadres from the Communist Youth League make rapid progress, because the Communist Youth League doesn’t care about money and property, if they want to accomplish something, they have to coordinate left and right, and work up and down, so they have relatively strong work ability;
On the other hand, because you have no real power, people neither ask you to approve projects nor ask you for funds, so not many people are offended, and even fewer people give bribes. In this way, the opportunities for promotion are much more than those of cadres with real power.
The third law
A good man is not necessarily a good official
The “good person” mentioned here has a specific meaning, that is, a person who everyone says is “good”.
There is a saying to describe this kind of person, called “Mr. Hao Hao”, and it is also the kind of person Chairman Mao once criticized for prudently protecting himself and seeking no faults. In real life, there are many such good people.
In the eyes of the leaders, the shortcomings are not obvious; in the eyes of the masses, the impression is not bad, so when these people become officials, most of them are proud of themselves and have made great progress.
In fact, such a “good man” may not be a good official.
Because being an official is a responsibility in itself. To perform one’s duties, one has to do things, but once things are done, there is no crime against others.
If you do good things, you will offend bad people, and if you do bad things, you will offend good people. Only those who have nothing to do can never offend anyone. Like bodhisattvas in temples, both good and bad people burn incense. Why?
Because people want to get promoted and get rich, they hope that Bodhisattva will bless them; while Bodhisattvas do nothing, so they will not offend anyone.
If the Bodhisattva can really promote someone to become an official, or help someone get rich, those who have not been promoted to make a fortune may also write a letter of complaint from the Bodhisattva.
Therefore, the Bodhisattva can be admired by thousands of people and worshiped by all living beings. The mystery is that he never does specific things. The cadres of our Communist Party can’t be Bodhisattvas, can they?
If you want to maintain a fair competitive environment and crack down on counterfeit and shoddy goods, then those who manufacture and sell counterfeit goods will hate you so much that they can’t wait to go to your ancestral grave in the middle of the night.
If you do bad things, such as harming public welfare and personal gain, good people will not spare you. Therefore, to be a “good official”, you must do good deeds and not offend good people, but at the same time you must dare to offend bad people. The more bad people you offend, the more competent you are as an official.
But that’s where the problem lies. Being an official nowadays depends on public opinion. But “public opinion” is a complex concept, there are hundreds of people with different mentalities.
Those good officials who dare to do things, as long as they do things, there is no guarantee that they will offend someone.
Although these people are not necessarily bad people, but their interests must be so. As the saying goes, it’s difficult to speak with one voice, and when five fingers stick out, it’s not always the same.
The same thing, because people have different interests, some people say it is good, while others say it is bad. If democratic evaluation is carried out, those who do things are often inferior to those who do not.
From an economic point of view, this is yet another democratic failure.
Therefore, when people choose officials, they must be democratic, but they must not be superstitious about democracy; they must look at votes, but they cannot just compare votes. The correct approach should be to adhere to the rules of majority election and “majority approval”, and implement centralization on the basis of democracy.
In our society, after all, good people are in the majority and bad people are in the minority. If 70% of the voters pass, he is already a good official; on the contrary, if he has 100% of the votes, he may be a “good person”, but as an official, he will be greatly compromised.
It is not difficult to imagine that if we can, under the guidance of democratic centralism, elect people who are approved by the majority and entrust them with important tasks, the official style will be greatly changed.
In this way, those people who were all-round and slick in the past, only looking for people but not doing things, will have no market; and those who are upright and dare to do things for the common people will have no worries about the future.
In fact, people are not gods, how can they be innocent? Therefore, cadres should be allowed to make mistakes. Especially in the current reform period, many things are unprecedented, and we have to cross the river by feeling the stones.
Since you are crossing the river by feeling the stones, you have to allow mistakes. Otherwise, who would dare to pioneer and innovate if we ask for completeness and blame?
Now there are indeed some people who do nothing by themselves, but always point fingers behind their backs. This is not right, that is wrong, but he doesn’t take any action on how to do it well.
If everyone is like this, just talking but not practicing, then who will promote our career? China’s reforms have always been subject to a law: breakthroughs are made at the local level, while norms are at the center.
This is true for rural reform, and so is for enterprise reform. If reforms were not allowed to be experimented at the beginning, and they could only be right, China’s reforms would definitely not be where they are today.
Economics does not object to you being a “good person”, but good officials are needed to develop the economy.
Our analysis proves that a good person is not necessarily a good official, so the author’s suggestion is: for the prosperity of the country and the prosperity of the cause, it is best not to let “good people” be officials.
