CHINA: Rise of a Model Bureaucrat

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Chairman Hua says that China will soon begin to demonstrate "the superiority of socialism," but at the moment it is all too easy to see the inefficiency, the mediocrity produced by lack of competition, and the sluggishness of the bureaucracy. The national travel service is both rigid and expensive: it refuses, for instance, to make a hotel booking unless a visitor agrees to bear the cost of hiring an interpreter to escort him from the airport to the hotel. Many visitors do, of course, need such a service, but those who do not must take it anyway. Reservations on the national airline are almost impossible to make. Factories tend to be dirty, basic maintenance of machinery woefully inadequate. Produce markets are erratically stocked, often with bruised and wilted fruit and vegetables.

The Chinese are being encouraged to study hard and think boldly. Yet if a worker goes to a library in a big city to borrow a book about art, he will in most cases be told that art books are available only for members of the official artists' societies. If a university or research institute wishes to order some books or magazines from abroad, it is not permitted to do so directly but must submit the request to higher authority for approval.

One particularly unpleasant feature of life is what the Chinese call qiang xing da pei, or forced distribution. It means simply that if one wants to buy a particular "item in a store, the clerk, who is eager for a productivity bonus, may insist on the purchase of an additional, slower-moving item as well.

Other difficulties derive from the enormous power that a person's work unit, the local authority over his life, has over what should be private matters. Permission of the unit is necessary to study abroad, to visit relatives in another city, even to get married or divorced. In one case in Peking a few months ago, a husband and wife wanted a divorce. The husband's unit agreed, the wife's did not; it took months of arbitration before the two were finally allowed to separate. Nothing is more saddening than the life of thousands, perhaps millions, of married couples who live apart because the bureaucracy has randomly assigned husbands and wives to work in different cities. It is an ironic fact of life today that as a result of somewhat relaxed emigration policies, it can be easier for someone to become reunited with a close relative abroad than with one who is living in China.

But there is no doubt that the political atmosphere is more relaxed and economic conditions better than they have been in years. There is cynicism, to be sure, and millions of Chinese would undoubtedly emigrate if given the chance. But there is also an astonishing lack of bitterness toward the regime, even among those who suffered terribly during the past two decades. Indeed there is an almost palpable desire among the Chinese to restore the greatness of their civilization. That kind of patriotism provides Premier Zhao, who also suffered during the Cultural Revolution, with a powerful asset as he sets himself to the chore of making China's "Four Modernizations" work.