Inside China’s Local Government: An Official’s Account

I dealt with county governments around Beijing for a couple of decades. Listening to this junior official describe his experience in China today, I believe his account is authentic and reflects the reality on the ground.

I want to share this because it gives a clear sense of what is happening on the ground. As Xi takes China down a new path, it is important to understand how that shift is playing out on the front line.

https://youtu.be/TEun-9pyE5s?is=1JT3jE5qMYNOyODJ

This account comes from a man born in 1995 who works in a local government office in a province in central China. I have grouped his account into five categories.

1. Local government: answering to superiors and carrying out political campaigns

• The focus of the work is appeasing superiors and avoiding blame. Nominally, it is about serving the public and resolving local problems. In practice, most effort goes into producing something acceptable to the people above. As long as you do not cause trouble for your superiors, you are “more than halfway there.” The rest is navigating personal relationships.

• Policies work against one another, while local officials spend their time delivering achievements that will help their superiors win promotion. A few years ago, a rural greening campaign meant spending over one million yuan (about US$150,000) on ornamental flowers and trees along ordinary streets and riverbanks, and painting murals on house walls. This year, the focus shifted to identifying people classified as potential risks to social stability.

• Identifying these people becomes a numerical quota that must be met. Officials must identify people in the “eight failures and losses” categories: failed investments, unemployment, setbacks in life, romantic setbacks, strained relationships, psychological imbalance, mental illness, and inadequate supervision of minors. They must also identify those with the “three lows and three fews”: low income, low status, low social standing; few social interactions, few opportunities for upward mobility, and few channels for support.

• Superiors demand specific headcounts and percentages. Zero is not an acceptable answer. If the numbers fall short, officials add people whose businesses have lost money, people living normally after a breakup or divorce, and ordinary children labelled as inadequately supervised. Failure to meet the target brings criticism for inadequate work, deductions from performance pay and allowances, and petty retaliation.

2. Distorted information: rigid targets force fabrication, while paperwork replaces actual work

• Agricultural targets ignore the actual returns from farming. Superiors impose mandatory rice-planting acreage, but farmers earn only a few hundred yuan (a few dozen US dollars) per mu—about 667 square metres—after costs. They could earn more doing casual work elsewhere. Local officials end up fabricating the figures to meet the targets.

• Statistics are cobbled together on the spot. Superiors demand data by a set deadline even though those figures have never previously been collected. When officials below them have no records, they are told to “make an estimate and submit it first.” Officials at the same level call one another to ask what numbers they are submitting and whether similar data exists from the previous year. Eventually, they put together figures based on gut feeling.

• Leaders restrict which results can be reported. The contributor says his immediate superiors “do not allow you to report negative growth.” He believes figures may be more accurate in good economic years, but reporting the truth becomes harder when the economy deteriorates.

• Government apps and meeting records create the appearance of work. Officials have more than ten government work apps on their phones, with mandatory check-ins to document river patrols, forest patrols, and efforts to prevent people from falling back into poverty. During a one-and-a-half-hour meeting, they switch banners three or four times, each displaying a different meeting topic. Leaders and attendees change poses for photographs, creating documentary evidence of four or five separate meetings.

3. Fiscal distress: officials’ career advancement comes first, while payments to ordinary people are delayed

• Even poorly paid workers face payment arrears. The contributor says local cleaners employed through contractors receive only 600 yuan (about US$90) a month, and even that is frequently delayed. The payments are labelled “labour subsidies” rather than wages to get around the fact that they fall below the minimum wage. A portion is also deducted, supposedly as a donation to a local charity.

• Public funds go first to projects that help leaders demonstrate achievements and win promotion. Payments to ordinary people and bills for supposedly “non-core activities” are delayed for as long as possible, because every superior wants to produce results quickly and move up.

• The model of supporting so many people from public funds cannot last. Revenue from land sales has dried up. Apart from a few developed areas along the eastern coast, many places have little capacity to generate their own revenue, yet large numbers of people depend on government finances. The contributor fears that without new sources of revenue, even the “iron rice bowl”—the promise of a secure government job and income—will no longer be secure.

4. Social conditions: young people lack a way forward, while those at the bottom bear the cost

• Youth unemployment is worse than the official figures suggest. The contributor cites a July youth unemployment rate of 17.9%, describing it as a new high even after the statistical methodology was revised. He believes the actual rate is far higher.

• He connects incidents such as the late-July police operation in Anshan, Liaoning province, in which 103 young people were arrested on suspicion of street racing and deliberately noisy driving, and clashes among fans of celebrities managed by the entertainment agency Times Fengjun in Chongqing, to youth unemployment and young people having nothing to do.

• Farmers have long endured institutional inequality. He points to the industrial–agricultural “price scissors”—keeping agricultural prices low relative to industrial goods to extract wealth from farmers. He also cites the household registration system, which ties access to public services and benefits to registered residency, alongside discrimination against rural residents and pension disparities. Hearing farmers still say “the country is good, the policies are good” feels like “a knife through the heart.” He believes the people behind those policies are precisely the ones exploiting them most.

• Life at the bottom of the K-shaped divide—where some prosper while others sink—is desperately grim. He believes the reality of local government is more absurd than most people realise, and life at the bottom is more miserable. “Ordinary Chinese people at the bottom really can endure so much.” But he has no answer as to whether that endurance is something to celebrate or mourn.

5. A local civil servant’s disillusionment: from idealism to self-preservation

• When he first passed the civil service entrance examination, he was full of enthusiasm. He believed local government was the front line of policy implementation and that the work would be meaningful. Soon after joining, he became disillusioned, feeling that every day was spent going through meaningless motions.

• Having a conscience and thinking about what you do makes the work painful. Filling in forms, fabricating information, and having blame pushed down onto him cause psychological torment. But the job market outside leaves him afraid to resign.

• He has abandoned his fixation on promotion and now focuses on protecting his health and income. At work, he fills in the forms and takes the photographs, without competing for advancement. After work, he exercises, holds on to his monthly income of a few thousand yuan (a few hundred US dollars), and uses AI to learn things that interest him, building skills for the day he might leave.