BEIJING — In July 2013, two female traffic police officers in Tangshan in Hebei Province got into a fistfight and video footage of the scene went viral. The Tangshan public security bureau brushed off the incident, saying that the women were “temporary traffic police officers.” The response was typical: Scandals in China are often blamed on lin shi gong, or “temporary workers.”
In a much more disturbing case last July, officers of the urban management enforcement bureau beat an unlicensed watermelon vendor to death on a busy street in Linwu in Hunan Province. Following the attack, which was photographed by onlookers who circulated their pictures online, some of the assailants were dismissed by the local authorities as “auxiliary” urban management officers. Auxiliary officer is another name for a temporary worker.
Blaming lin shi gong has become so widespread in recent years that the practice has even been criticized by the government’s own newspapers.
China Daily, a party newspaper, published an article in December 2010 under the headline “Blaming Temporary Workers?” declaring that “employers, especially some government departments, should stop using temporary workers as an excuse to shirk their responsibilities in scandals such as forced demolition, and the government should expedite the process of improving the system of accountability to stop the abuse of power.”
This temporary-worker ploy begs several questions: Who hired the workers? Whose orders were they following? Who was in charge? Did they receive adequate training before they began work?
Chinese businesses and government use temporary workers like much of the rest of the world to cut costs or to avoid red tape: Many are given jobs with lower pay and fewer benefits than regular staff. But whether the scapegoats are, in fact, temporary workers, or full-time staff members who are called temporary for political expediency, the logic of the situation is simple: Temporary workers are not formal government employees, so whatever goes wrong, the government need not assume responsibility.
In the past, the government would deny or write off its errors with outrageous lies. It claimed, for example, that the Great Famine of 1959-62 was caused by “three years of natural disasters.” But in the Information Age, when the malfeasance of government agents is often caught on cellphone cameras and distributed online, denial is rarely an option. The government has had to find scapegoats.
The obsession with temporary workers is indicative of a larger failure: temporary governance.
In China, grandiose concepts like “fundamental national policies,” “governing strategies” and the “Five-Year Plan” appear constantly in the official media, but the government actually lacks long-term strategies or plans. Many policies, regulations and laws are shortsighted and the products of a knee-jerk approach to governance.
Perhaps the most damning effect of the government’s temporary approach to governance is in the legal sphere. Mao once said, “An editorial in the People’s Daily can be carried out nationwide — what’s the need for laws?” In the post-Mao era, the government promulgated a huge number of laws and regulations, in an effort to integrate with the rest of the world. But many of them have an obvious temporary flavor.
In 2007, a man in Sichuan Province was hit by a train and died. Acting in accordance with “temporary regulations on handling railway accidents that involve other vehicles, as well as deaths and injury,” the Railways Ministry awarded his family a payment of 700 yuan (about $100), according to the Xinhua news agency. The temporary regulations were issued in 1979.
“Re-education through labor,” the notorious system for incarcerating people without court proceedings, is perhaps the best example. What in 1957 was supposed to be a temporary measure for punishing offenders for minor crimes stood as the law of the land for 56 years, until it was abandoned last year.
Three years ago a publisher used an article of mine without permission. Later I was sent a payment of 30 yuan, for 2,700 words. That payment was in accordance with the 1990 “temporary regulations governing payment for authors,” which stipulates payment of 10 to 30 yuan per 1,000 characters. Two and a half decades after this regulation was issued, 30 yuan does not cover a taxi ride across Beijing.
Not only are personnel and laws often ephemeral, even government agencies are set up on a temporary basis. There are innumerable temporary “offices,” “leading groups” and “committees” in China that have ill-defined powers, with no legal basis for operating. Netizens have poured ridicule on peculiar government organizations like the “Office for Prohibiting the Consumption of Alcohol During Lunchtime” in Henan Province and the “Office for Immediate Action,” which is supposed to improve government efficiency, in Shangdong Province. The “Office for Steamed-Bun Manufacturing and Marketing Management,” ostensibly started to regulate steamed-bun quality, was closed in 2001 after public complaints over its absurdity.
How effective is China’s temporary governance? Some observers can point to the economic growth over the past 30 years as proof of Beijing’s great achievements. But success is more than economic indicators. I am more concerned about the degrading quality of air, water and food, and about what the country’s shaky political foundation means for the future of the country.
Over the past three decades, a once-blue sky has become a toxic smog, and political power has become a tool to make money and a weapon to kill. I have witnessed numerous preventable disasters, and the loss of countless lives.
This is the consequence of temporary governance, and the damage will be permanent. Yet no one takes responsibility for the country’s failures because, after all, it is governed by temporary workers.
Murong Xuecun is a novelist and blogger and the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.” This article was translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz from the Chinese
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