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The ballad of Mr Guo
郭先生的歌谣
What makes local-government officials tick
地方官员为何如此
SINGING KARAOKE WITH Taiwanese investors, smearing birthday cake on the cheeks of an American factory owner, knocking back baijiu, a Chinese spirit, with property developers: Guo Yongchang would do anything to attract investment to Gushi, a county of 1.6m people in Henan province, where he served as party secretary. His antics are recorded in “The Transition Period”, a remarkable fly-on-the-wall documentary about his last months in office, filmed by Zhou Hao.
Mr Guo persuades one developer to raise the price of his flats because Gushi people are interested only in the priciest properties. After a boozy dinner he drapes himself over the developer’s shoulder and extracts a promise from him to add more storeys to his tower to outdo the one in the neighbouring city.
The one-upmanship exemplified by Mr Guo has generated great economic dynamism, but also great inefficiency. When the central government tries to stop economic overheating, local governments resist. Conversely, when the government urged the banks to support its 2008 stimulus effort, local governments scrambled to claim an outsized share of the lending. The result is a local-government debt burden worth over a fifth of China’s 2011 GDP.
The worst abuses, however, involve land. Local officials can convert collectively owned rural plots into land for private development. Since farmers cannot sell their land directly to developers, they have to accept what the government is willing to pay. Often that is not very much.
Such perverse incentives have caused China’s towns and cities to grow faster in area than they have grown in population. Their outward ripple has engulfed some rural communities without quite erasing them. The perimeter of Wenzhou city in Zhejiang province, to take one example, now encompasses clutches of farmhouses, complete with vegetable plots, quacking ducks and free-range children. This results in some incongruous sights. Parked outside one farmhouse are an Audi, a Mercedes and a Porsche. Alas, they do not belong to the locals but to city slickers who want their hub caps repainted.
Oddly, where electoral reforms have given Chinese villagers a bigger say in local government, growth tends to slow, according to Monica Martinez-Bravo of Johns Hopkins University and her colleagues. This is partly because elected local officials shift their efforts from expanding the economy to providing public goods, such as safe water. But it is also because a scattered electorate cannot monitor them as closely as their party superiors can.
Fear of their bosses and hunger for revenues keep local officials on their toes. Mr Guo, star of “The Transition Period”, was eventually convicted of bribery. He was not entirely honest in the performance of his duties, and not always sober either. But with all the parties, banquets and karaoke, no one could accuse him of being lazy.
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