A long way from mandarins to civil servants

Early one morning in 2023, Zhang Guoqing, 51, the head of a district in Beijing, carries his briefcase and walks out of his apartment. Greeting neighbors with a smile, he hurries to the subway station to catch a train. After a 30-minute ride, Zhang walks into his office building at 8:45, and starts to go through his agenda.

Zhang's day is packed with meetings and on-site inspections, and he is scheduled to join a live radio talk show to answer questions from listeners after work.

Spending the whole morning to revise the budget plan, Zhang and his colleagues finally manage to save significant sum of money, which could be used to fund an initiative to purchase school buses for a few elementary schools.

Finishing lunch at the canteen, Zhang and his aide stop by a neighborhood, where residents have been complaining about the planned construction of a garbage disposal plant, to collect their opinions, before heading to a business forum to draw investment.

This vision is a long way off. But this picture of an ideal day for an official is the image that the central government wants to start projecting in the new year. Ordinary Chinese tend to believe that officials skip between banquets, mistresses and bribes, with the occasional brief drop-in at the office for work and photo opportunities.

Peng Zongchao, a professor with Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management, told the Global Times that positive signs of a change in the atmosphere in official circles have been spotted, but "whether we could see fundamental changes toward this direction lies in the authority's determination in how big the steps would be made in their reform."

Cutting red tape

Ye Qing, a deputy director of the Hubei Provincial Bureau of Statistics and deputy to the National People's Congress, has been submitting motions calling for reform of the use of government vehicles for the past decade to little avail.

After several years of frustration, Ye was delighted to find out that his proposed reform was incorporated into Premier Wen Jiabao's work report in 2011.

At the local level, East China's Hangzhou has cut its public expenditure by one third compared with 2002, when the city kicked off a reform in the use of government vehicles. Hangzhou's reform has become a case study for other regions.

Early in December, a meeting of the newly-elected Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee adopted a document calling for senior leaders to improve their work style in eight areas, including less spending on official trips and using smaller security forces when on the road.

The document was soon put into practice by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, during his trip to Guangdong Province.

Wang Zhenyao, a former official with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, told the Global Times he could sense the top leaders' determination to tackle the old-fashioned work style following the once-in-a-decade leadership transition, rather than it being empty talk.

As the new work style sweeps across the country, there are hopes that 10 years from now lavish government buildings, red carpets, lengthy meetings and luxury banquets will have no place.