Email of the writer: jw368@163.com
The Chinese Government has been working hard to simplify administrative procedures for individuals or businesses seeking government services in order to facilitate the public and stimulate market and social vitality.
At a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on May 16, more convenient measures were discussed and adopted.
A single form and one-stop services will be set up for the filing and registration of foreign-invested enterprises, with the new process conducted entirely online and free of charge, scraping paperwork or appearances in person.
All government service items will be put on an e-platform for accessing interconnected government services at the national, provincial and city levels.
All government agencies are required to cut red tape to allow individual and businesses to get matters done at a one-service center in one visit.
For millions of ordinary service-seekers, the last part is the most anticipated and welcome, for many of them have had unpleasant and even painful experiences of accessing government services. What the public loathe most is the prolonged and complicated, and sometimes confusing, procedures. In addition, some grass-roots officials or employees often engage in endless haggling and shifting of responsibilities by passing the buck or deliberately making difficulties for the service-seekers.
Days ago, a journalist investigation on CCTV revealed a discouraging story about a woman who simply wanted to apply for a hukou (household registration certificate) for herself and her son in order to qualify her son for primary school enrollment.
Currently working in Guangzhou, and with her son reaching the age for school, the woman, who doesn’t have a Guangzhou hukou, has to go back to her hometown, a tiny town in Guizhou Province, to apply for a separate hukou independent of the hukou registering her and her parents. Only with a separate hukou can she secure a school place for her son in Guangzhou.
It never occurred to the woman that such a simple procedure would take her over a month in her hometown, with no solution yet in sight.
Her local police station told her that a certificate of the ownership of a lot of land or a property under her name will qualify her to have a separate hukou, and, of course, she has neither. Then she went to the local land management offices to seek help. The solution she got there was to get a separate hukou to be entitled to a lot of land of her own.
In the following month, she made countless visits to various agencies looking for solutions in vein, as every department invoked a host of reference rules or regulations to turn down her request or push her to other agencies. At the end of the TV program, the tearful woman was still gripped by despair, not knowing what to do.
The woman’s predicament is not an isolated case, as there has been a widespread saying to describe the situation the public dreads encountering: when service-seekers enter a government agency, they see long faces, have trouble getting matters done and very often have no idea what department to visit.
There may be many objective causes for the undesired situation. For one thing, there are many policies, regulations or rules that are either obsolete, contradicting each other, or inexecutable.
Four years ago, during the procedure of handling matters relating to my retirement and pension standard, I ran into an extremely unpleasant man-made hassle. Though my age is explicitly printed on my ID card, the only legitimate certificate of personal identity, an employee of the agency responsible for examining and approving my application spotted a “mistake” in my personal profile: my birth date was later than what shown on my ID, and ridiculously, they claimed that, in accordance with an official policy, they must use the birth date in my profile, which was mistakenly written by a careless guy who wrote comments on my work performance, instead of the date on the ID, as the date to determine when my pension issuance should start. I was driven mad, though I finally settled the matter by getting a certificate of my birth date from the police station in my hometown, Hangzhou, which keeps these precious records.
So the first step is to clear up the existing documents that cause inconvenience, confusion and inexecutability.
(The author is an English tutor and freelance writer)