Chinese officials named and shamed for ‘lying flat’ by local governments, sending shock waves through civil service

A Nanshan government employee named Huang confirmed on Friday that the name and shame announcement was genuine. The list was the result of “interviews, ground surveys, democratic evaluation and review”, he said.

A search of local information web pages shows the targeted workers are all among the lowest grade of officials, variously managing a local grid, neighbourhood committee, or working in the town’s cultural and tourism office.

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According to Huang, the eight officials all ranked last in their units and face a coaching period to “help them to recognise their problems and improve their work”.

Nanshan is not the only place in China using controversial – sometimes extreme – methods to tackle lazy officials.

Seven workers were admonished by party officials after they were identified by a “find the lying-flat cadres around you” campaign launched in July by Yancheng city’s Binhai county, in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

Many other provinces, including Anhui, Henan, Zhejiang and Fujian, conducted similar campaigns last year to root out the slackers in local government ranks.

Beijing is exerting tremendous pressure on the bureaucracy to meet its ambitious policy goals amid external and internal challenges. At the same time, morale among the millions of rank and file officials needs to be addressed.

Many low level bureaucrats – the arms and legs that execute the top leadership’s policy decisions – are already facing pay cuts, on top of heavy workloads, seemingly never-ending inspections, numerous political studies, on top of maintaining social stability.

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Alfred Wu, an associate professor with the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said China needs to be careful about naming and shaming underperforming local officials.

The method could evolve into a radical Mao-style arbitrary labelling and purge campaign if not handled with care, he warned.

“Motivating the public sector properly is a common challenge faced by governments around the world, as the right balance of reward and punishment is always tricky, but naming and shaming is still a bit extreme,” Wu said.

“In many other countries, underperforming officials are also served warning letters or are admonished in talks with their supervisors, but all those are done in private.”

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A few mainland media outlets weighed in to the debate, with questions about the effectiveness of the approach. Among them was Shanghai’s official Jiefang Daily, which said local governments had “hastily” launched name and shame campaigns.

According to Jiefang Daily, the move was simply a response to recent social concerns that some people in China were adopting a “lying-flat” mentality, just as the country’s development faces an increasingly challenging environment.

“The effectiveness of the evaluation method may not stand the test of practice,” said the January 2 report, which warned that rectification of the “just-skate-by cadres” mostly relies on punishment, especially naming and shaming the bad examples.

“This may have a temporary deterrent effect, but whether it will have long-term effects remains to be seen,” it said.

A Guangdong disciplinary official concurred, telling the South China Morning Post that while the party encourages discipline enforcement to make sure officials who commit minor misconduct “blush and sweat with embarrassment”, these actions are usually behind the closed doors of party meetings.

“We shall be critical of those who slack, but also give them some time to change. Putting a label on them and telling the world about it is not the way, as you will create a stereotype on them,” said the official, who declined to be named as he is not authorised to speak to overseas media.