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Village officials required to live near work

By Wang Huazhong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-29 08:28

CHONGQING: "Smile, you're on Cadre Camera."

You don't need to be a superstar to be followed by cameras in Yunyang county. You just need to be a government official.

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Hundreds of officials in the county who have been commuting from their urban homes to their jobs in villages will now be required to live where they work.

And just to make sure they aren't sneaking away, random checks will include phone calls and possible visits by county leaders accompanied by camera crews.

While it may seem a bit heavy-handed, the measures are meant to ensure government officials stay close to the people they oversee.

Across China, many village cadres who prefer city life have opted for excessive commuting.

"For years, hundreds of them used to arrive late and rush back to town early, leaving today's jobs to be done tomorrow and keeping locals' questions unanswered or issues and conflicts unsolved," Zhu Weiming, vice director of Yunyang county's Party organization department, told China Daily.

This has led to the livelihoods and interests of the people in their jurisdictions being ignored, and has been cited as a reason for the increase in mass incidents.

Zhu Lijia, director of Public Administration Studies from the National School of Administration, said from the emergence of migrating officials in 1992 until 2007, the number of mass incidents rose from 8,700 to 90,000 in the same period - indicating an inevitable link between the two.

"Being aware of the negative effects, we built basketball courts and dining halls to improve the living conditions and help the cadres settle locally," said Yunyang vice director Zhu Weiming.

Under the new conditions, "migrating officials", as locals call them, face the prospects of being reprimanded and possibly sacked for skipping town.

"Migrating officials are an outcome of the imbalanced development between rural and urban areas in China," Professor Gong Weibin, director of Politics Studies from the National School of Administration, said in an earlier commentary.

The improvement in China's traffic system, quick urbanization and increasing job rotations for cadres will make the migrating official a prevailing phenomenon, Gong wrote.

According to Zhu Weiming, at least 30 percent of all officials based in 42 villages and townships under Yunyang's administration commute or pay frequent "business trips downtown".

A survey by the Party school of Sichuan province showed 76 percent of all the province's village and township cadres reside in counties or cities, People's Daily reported.