Chinese Filled With Pride, Uncertainty Over Cutbacks

When Sun Chunlin, a government engineer-administrator, joined co-workers in a crowded meeting room to watch the noon news on Friday, he was swept with competing emotions of loss, national pride and uncertainty about the future.

On the screen, a senior Chinese Cabinet official was announcing the elimination of Sun’s employer, the massive Ministry of Metallurgical Industry, as part of a sweeping reorganization and downsizing of China’s giant state bureaucracy.

Luo Gan, secretary-general of the State Council, told delegates at the National People’s Congress, China’s supreme legislature, that half the country’s 8 million bureaucrats will be axed before the end of the year.

“If we don’t reform now,” Luo explained to the hushed assembly at the Great Hall of People, “there is no way out.

“Over-staffing is severe. This tends to promote red tape and bureaucracy, fosters corruption and unhealthy practices and is a huge burden for national finances,” Luo said.

In an admission that would have been unthinkable in the era of paternalistic socialism that once ruled here, Luo said the government could no longer shoulder the burden of its cradle-to-grave state welfare system.

One man whose job is on the line is Sun, 35, a midlevel administrator at the hulking stone-faced, seven-story metallurgical ministry headquarters near the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing.

Watching it all unfold on television, Sun, who is married and has a 7-year-old girl, said he was instantly struck with the logic of the government plan.

“China’s future is at stake,” Sun said in an interview on the sidewalk outside the ministry building as he left work Friday afternoon. “We all see the bad effect of too many people in government buildings with nothing to do.”

Even so, he added, “everyone still has a strong emotional attachment to the work unit where he has labored for so many years. It’s only natural.”

While he acknowledges that he may lose his job, he said he expects to be reassigned--and to continue living in the apartment provided by the metallurgical ministry for only token rent.

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Under the reorganization plan outlined Friday, the number of central government ministries will be cut from 40 to 29. The old Soviet-model industrial ministries for metallurgy, machine building, electronics, light industry and textiles will be downgraded to bureaus within the existing State Economic and Trade Commission.

Despite the dramatic nature of the reforms, Luo described them as “an interim compromise” solution to the problems of China’s unwieldy centralized government. Luo said some in the Communist Party leadership argued that the “steps should be greater and that we should try to accomplish the goals all at once.”

“Other comrades,” Luo said, “thought we should go slower.”

He said some officials fear that the country’s cities, already burdened with large numbers of unemployed workers from inefficient state factories, will not be able to absorb the ranks of laid-off workers envisioned in the more severe version of the plan.

Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin made the final decision, choosing a plan that is “active but prudent,” Luo said.

Even in the plan’s compromise form, there remains considerable doubt that the government can pull off what it has promised.

It is not the first time the Chinese leadership has announced plans to slash its stifling bureaucracy. A similarly ambitious plan announced by Luo before the National People’s Congress in 1993 went mostly unrealized.

“The final result of this reform will be what we in China call ‘closing the temple but keeping the monks,’ ” Wu Guoguang, a former Chinese government official now in Hong Kong, told Associated Press.

“They can reduce some of the temples, but the monks are still there. They just redistribute the monks to other monasteries.”

The difference this time, counter supporters of the plan, is that the cuts will be administered by a new head of government with a reputation for efficiency: current chief of the economy Zhu Rongji.

Zhu is expected to be formally installed as premier March 17, replacing Li Peng, but the reorganization plan already represents his economic strategy and management style.

For example, the plan requires all the ministries to clearly describe their missions, organization structure and staff needs before the end of the year. Provincial ministries face the same requirements.

In addition to serving as premier, Zhu is also expected to be named head of the State Development Planning Commission that will supervise the reorganization.

“The difference between this year’s reduction in red tape and previous ones is that, this time, Zhu seems to have both a rather clear mandate, a la Hercules, to clean out the Augean stables, and a rather strong broom with which to do the job,” said UCLA political scientist Richard Baum, an expert on China.

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Inside the reorganized ministries, Zhu is likely to find the strongest support for the reforms from young bureaucrats and researchers who have felt restricted by the entrenched core of senior administrators, many of whom came to authority in the early 1970s when Maoist orthodoxy ruled the land and new ideas were discouraged.

Another metallurgy ministry engineer interviewed Friday afternoon was practically ecstatic over the possibilities the reforms offer.

“Many of our officials now are slow of mind and slow to act,” said the young mechanical engineer, who declined to identified. “Under them, talented people cannot fully develop. It is mostly older people--those 40 and older--who are not convinced that the reorganization is a good idea.”

* ON THEIR OWN

Plans for economic, government reforms will leave many Chinese to sink or swim. A2