Tofu projects in China (6)

Getting tough

Liu Qinglong, the sociology professor, echoed Zhou's view, but said that harsh punishment would not solve the fundamental problem that leads to poor quality. He sees that as a faulty view of achievements and China's unscientific system of evaluating performance by government workers.

"Our current performance evaluations are based mainly on some hard unalterable quota, like the rate of increase in the GDP, the number of big projects, common people's satisfaction, the number of petitioners and cases of big accidents. This kind of evaluating system can only make more cadres want to build more prestige and gift projects to increase their own achievements," Liu said. "These projects are just ladders for their promotion, and who cares about the safety hazard in the future."

To change the situation, he suggested that assessment criteria be diversified. The upper level or central government cannot be the only judge of cadres' performance, but needs to introduce public opinion polling as a supportive tool. And the news media should be a watchdog, he said.

"The process of setting project quality enforcement and supervision lacks a strict basis in law," Zhou Hongjun said.

In a mature society ruled by law, even the government budget is considered as law, so leaders and government workers are very limited in the decisions they can make. Society calls for managing state affairs according to law, Zhou said, so it's essential that specific laws be incorporated into cadres' assessment criteria.

To improve the quality of government work, Xia suggested that the central government set up more good examples of people who not only follow the concept of sustainable development, but also own up to their responsibilities and are brave in making innovations. To highly promote these cadres nationwide and call for all others to learn from them would cultivate the correct view of achievements, he said.