IF THERE was one thing that the world’s tycoons agreed on at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, it was that the Chinese state is a paragon of efficiency—especially compared with the doltish, venal clowns in Washington and Brussels. “Beijing really gets things done,” sighed one American chief executive. “Their government people are so much smarter: it’s terrifying,” enthused one of the world’s richest men. The chalets resounded with stories of contracts rapidly signed, roads speedily built and young engineers designing brilliant cars and software programs.
如果说在今年的达沃斯世界经济论坛上有一件事得到全球巨头们的认可，那就是中国政府是效率的典范—尤其同华盛顿和布鲁塞尔的那些愚蠢且唯利是图的小丑们比较而言。一名美国首席行政长官叹息道：“北京确实能把事情办好。”一名全球最富有的人热情地说道：“他们的政府工作人员要聪明的多：这太令人害怕了。”屋子里回荡着诸多故事——合同快速签订，道路迅速修建，年轻的工程师设计一流的汽车和软件程序。
There is indeed much to admire about parts of the Chinese government. Over the past 30 years the regime has overseen perhaps the biggest increase in economic well-being ever, with several hundred million people moving into the middle class (even if the state had previously been the main thing that held them back). China is led by a group of people who take government enormously seriously.
确实应当多多称赞中国政府的一些部门。过去30年间，在政府的监管下，经济福利水平有了历史性的重大飞跃；数亿人成为中产阶级（虽然在过去，国家也许是阻碍他们致富的主要因素）。一些对政府工作极其严肃认真的人正在领导中国。
For all this, there is something of a Potemkin village about the Chinese state. It is, after all, not terribly hard for a dictatorship to build roads and railways faster than a democracy can. Multinational companies and the educated middle classes are doing well from the state, but the poorer majority in this ever more unequal country get a raw deal. And even if some of its leaders are trying to move closer to Singapore’s model, there are countless stronger forces pushing in the opposite direction.
尽管如此，中国的现状有点像波特金的村庄,虚饰外表。毕竟，在专制社会修建道路要比在民主社会修建道路要快，这并非难事。跨国公司和受过教育的中产阶级从国家获益良多，愈发贫穷的大多数人民在这种越来越不公平的国家里却遭受了不公平的待遇。即使一些领导人试图尝试新加坡模式，不计取数的更加强大的势力却却在反向用力。
Begin with the part of the Chinese state that is winning most praise abroad at the moment: education. In the recent rankings of school students by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Shanghai hurtled to the top in mathematics, science and reading, ahead of more than 60 other countries. China is also being cited as the coming force in universities. The number of higher-education institutions has more than doubled in the past decade, from 1,022 to 2,263. The number of students enrolled in degree courses has risen from 1m in 1997 to 5m.
首先谈谈目前中国政府最被外界称道的部门：教育。根据经济合作与发展组织（OECD）国际学生评估项目（PISA）最近学生排名的统计，上海在数学，科学以及阅读领域一跃成为榜首，将其他60多个国家甩在身后。同时，中国也被誉为是大学界的新生力量。过去十年中，高等教育学院数量从1022所增加到2263所，增幅超过一倍。学位课程的招生人数从1997年的100万增加到500万。
Behind this gleaming façade, however, not everything is what it seems. The new universities are real enough, though they remain middle-class bastions: very few of China’s poorer citizens get a look-in. But China’s schools are not as uniformly good as Shanghai’s miraculous PISA performance suggests. Investment remains low, even by developing-country standards. As far back as 1993 the state pledged to spend 4% of GDP on education: in 2006 the figure was still 2%, and the 4% target was put back first to 2010 and now to 2012. China Youth Daily, an organ of the Communist Youth League, has observed that China spends five times more on wining and dining local-government officials than it does on educating children up to 16.
在这样的光鲜外表之下，并非所有的事物都那么美好。新的大学确实不少，尽管他们仍然是中产阶级的堡垒：极少的中国贫民有机会进入。同上海的学生取得的不可思议的PISA表现不同的是，中国的学校并非都好。即使以发展中国家的标准来评估，教育的投资依旧不足。早在1993年，国家就承诺将4%的GDP用于教育：2006年，这一数字仍然是2%，4%的目标先是推迟至2010，现在又设定在2012。 中国青年报是共产主义青年团的一家机构。该报注意到，中国在请当地政府官员喝酒吃饭上的开销是教育16岁以下孩子支出的5倍多。
The schools in the countryside are particularly bad. The recent abolition of fees has meant that more pupils now attend them, but it has also prompted local governments to cut back on full-time teachers. In the cities more money is spent, though it still usually takes a backhander to get a child into a good school. And many of the poorest children in the cities miss out on public education of any sort.
农村学校的质量尤其差。最近取消的教育费用意味着更多的孩子可以上学；但同时也促使地方政府削减全职老师数量。城市学校的投资更多，塞红包把孩子弄进好学校的事情却也司空见惯。许多生活在城市的最贫穷孩子却无法去任何的公立学校接受教育。
One example of this is indirectly provided by Shenzhen’s new civil society: a school for the children of migrant factory workers set up by the Ciwei Philanthropy Institute. The school buzzes with endeavour. It looks after 132 children who cannot go to the city’s schools because their parents, many of whom work for a nearby nuclear plant, are from out of town. That might seem fair enough for the children of temporary workers, but virtually all the pupils at this school were born in Shenzhen and have lived there all their lives. They are part of a permanent majority. Out of Shenzhen’s population of more than 14m people, only 2.5m are residents.
深圳新的民间团体间接地提供了一个例子：深圳慈卫公益事业发展中心（Ciwei）为工厂的移民工人子女盖了一所学校。这个学校非常忙碌。它需要照看132名无法到当地学校上学的孩子。因为他们的父母都来自外地，其中有很多人都在附近的核电厂工作。似乎这么做对临时工的孩子很公平；然而，事实是，该校所有的学生都在深圳出生，一直长在深圳。他们是深圳永久性大多数居民的一部分。深圳1400万人口中，仅有250万是当地人。
These “black” workers and their children are not entitled to health care, education or pensions in the city because their hukou (residence registration) is elsewhere. In theory you can transfer your hukou from one place to another. With enough documentation, any child under 15 should be able to get free education in Shenzhen. But it is a fiendishly complicated and corrupt business, and many migrants don’t have the right papers. Some leave their children behind; others cough up for the 70 or so rudimentary private schools in the city. That saves Shenzhen’s mainly middle-class residents and the foreign companies based there a lot of taxes, but it also creates an almost apartheid-like class system.
由于不是深圳户口（住所登记），这些“黑色”工人和他们的子女无法享有该市的医疗，教育和养老金福利。理论上是可以将你的户口迁至其他地方。只要有足够的文件材料，任何15岁以下的孩子都可以在深圳获得免费的教育。然而，这是一个极其复杂和腐败的业务，许多移民无法弄到所要求的材料。一些人把孩子留在老家；另一些人被迫拿钱让孩子在深圳70多所初级私立学校就读。如此一来，深圳的大部分中产阶级居民和驻深圳的外国公司省下了大量的赋税，但同时产生了类似种族隔离的阶级系统。
Much of the rest of Chinese local government is similarly skewed against the agrarian poor. Most of the main Chinese taxes go to Beijing; the central government then sends some money back to the provinces, and from there it trickles down through the prefectures to the lower levels of local government that are responsible for basic services. Chinese cities make ends meet through land-grabs. Property on the edge of town is bought, using compulsory-purchase orders that seldom pay the landowners properly, and then sold to developers, who sell on the houses they build to the richer urban middle classes. Caixin, a magazine, reported recently that revenue from land-rights sales made up 46% of all local-government revenue. That hardly seems sustainable.
大多数其余的中国当地政府同样对耕种土地的贫穷农民不友善。中国主要税收的大部分都上缴北京；然后中央政府将一些资金返还给各省，各省再拨给各县直到负责基础服务的各个下层当地政府。中国的城市通过抢占土地应付开支。政府使用强制令购买城市边缘的地产，却很少付给他们适当的补偿费用；这些地产随后卖给开发商，开发商在这些土地上盖房子，卖给城市里的富裕中产阶级。Caixin杂志近期报道，土地出让金占到所有当地政府税收的46%。这种现象似乎完全不可持续。
The perils of making a fuss
小题大做的风险
Many people are angry about the quality of public services, as Yang Jianchang has found. He is in charge of the Luohu District Office of Market Supervision (Industrial and Commercial Bureau), which deals with counterfeiting; musty signs outline the penalties for producing fake Hermès bags. But Mr Yang, a deputy in Shenzhen’s Municipal People’s Congress, is best known for being China’s most accountable representative.
杨剑昌发现，许多人对公共服务的质量感到气愤。他管理罗湖区市场监督办公室（工商局）；该部门负责打假，单调的标志概述了伪造爱马仕包袋的处罚条例。然而，作为深圳市人民代表大会一员的杨，是全国知名的最负责任的代表。
In 2005 he took the unusual step of opening a separate personal office. People and mail flooded in, mostly complaining about the government. Over the past five years he has taken up 3,000 cases on behalf of some 20,000 people. He has been threatened and roughed up; his health is poor. Some of the villains and bureaucrats whom he pursued—for instance, for selling unsafe food—have gone to prison. Many more have not (thanks to the intervention of what people in Shenzhen describe as “powerful interests”), but he has usually caused enough fuss for them to stop whatever they were up to.
2005年，他不同寻常地开放了一间单独的私人办公室。群众和信件如洪水般涌来，大多是对政府有所抱怨。过去5年间，他收到大约2万人的3000份案件。他一直遭到威胁和殴打，他的健康状况很差。他所查办的一些坏人和官僚主义者—例如出售不安全食物的违法者—已经锒铛入狱。还有更多的人逍遥法外（出于深圳人所谓的“有权力的利益集团”的干预）；但是，杨已经使他们受到了大众的注意，迫使他们放弃所从事的非法行径。
Mr Yang is a proud party man: his office is adorned with pictures of him in his uniform and with citations from various Communist dignitaries. You might imagine that a regime on an anti-corruption drive might embrace this example of accountable government. But last October the National People’s Congress passed a law in effect banning deputies from setting up personal offices. The law applies across the country, and it seems to have been drawn up to stop people like Mr Yang. He has closed his personal office but mail continues to flood in, most of it by recorded delivery, so people know he has got it and will send it on to the right bureaucrat.
杨是一个自豪的共产党人：他的办公室里挂着他穿着制服的照片，还有一些不同的共产党要人的语录。你也许会认为一个反腐败的政权也许会欢迎这种负责政府的榜样。然而，去年10月，全国人民代表大会通过一项法律，实际上禁止各代表设立私人办公室。该法律在全国范围适用，似乎是为了制止像杨这样的人而制定得。他已经关闭了私人办公室，但是信件还是不停地寄来，大多是采用挂号的形式，这样人们知道他已经收到信件，并会将它们移交给合适的部门。
All this points to the sheer unresponsiveness of much of China’s government. It may be fairly easy for the boss of a large Western multinational to see a senior state official, but for a Chinese citizen merely getting a few minutes with a lowly bureaucrat is an ordeal: he needs to fight his way past several offices, guards and indifferent assistants intended to keep him out.
这一切表明许多中国政府完全没有反应。一个大型西方跨国公司的老总会见一个国家高级官员相当容易，而一个中国公民想要同地位低下的官员说几分钟的话却要遭受折磨：他必须一路披荆斩棘，冲破官员，警卫和冷漠无情的助手的阻挠才能进去。
And the local satraps are not that much more responsive to Beijing either. The central government has the clout to compel bureaucrats to act quickly on issues of national importance such as foreign investment or responding to emergencies like the SARS epidemic; but on plenty of other issues the local government ignores them.
当地政府对北京的响应也并不强烈。在一些关系到国家重大利益的事情上，例如国外投资或对紧急事件如SARS传染病的响应，中央政府有权促使地方官员迅速行动；但在许多其他事务上，当地政府对中央的指令则毫不放在心上。
For the clever young technocrats at the top, the medium-term prospects for the Chinese state must be quite frightening. The country needs to find a more secure way of financing local government. It must improve its current rudimentary health-care coverage, not least to cope with the ageing population that is the legacy of its one-child policy. Above all there are the demands of its increasingly affluent citizens. Most of them are well over half-way towards the income level of around $12,000 a year (at purchasing-power parity) which elsewhere in emerging Asia, notably Taiwan and South Korea, resulted in demands for greater political freedom and proper government services.
对于处于顶层，聪明且年轻的技术专家来说，中国中期的发展前景非常令人恐惧。中国需要找到一个更加稳当的方式来资助地方政府。它必须提高目前基本医疗保障的覆盖范围，尤其是要涵盖由独生子女政策造成的老年群体。最重要的是，要顾及到越来越富裕的群众的需求。大部分人的收入都快接近每年12000美元（用购买力平价计算，这是新兴亚洲国家的收入，尤其是台湾和韩国）。人们要求更多的政治自由以及适当的政府服务。
A long, hard march
漫长而艰难的旅程
During Wen Jiabao’s much commented-on visit to Shenzhen last year when the city was celebrating its 30th anniversary as a special economic zone, he tried to alert his party to the perils of its position. “If there is no guarantee of reform of the political system,” the prime minister said, “then results obtained from the reform of the economic system may be lost, and the goal of modernisation cannot be achieved.”
去年深圳庆祝经济特区成立30周年之际，温家宝的深圳之行备受评论；他试图警告他所在党的危险处境。总理说道：“如果不能保障政治体制改革，经济体制改革做取得的成果也许会丧失，现代化的目标也将无法实现。”
By Chinese standards Shenzhen’s “small government, big society” programme is fairly dramatic. The city has eliminated a third of its departments and scrapped a jobs-for-life pledge for newly hired bureaucrats; and through Ma Hong’s office, it is trying to outsource work to NGOs. Sunny Lee, the founder of the Ciwei school, points out that until recently it would have been unthinkable for a non-party member like him to set up a school. He talks about Shenzhen being “an El Dorado for NGOs”. Billboards around the city proclaim: “Civil Society: Grow Together”.
用中国人的标准看，深圳的“小政府，大社会”模式非常引人注意。该市取消了三分之一的部门，对新聘用的官员废除了终身职业的承诺。Ma Hong的办公室正试图把一些工作转包给非政府组织处理。深圳慈卫公益事业发展中心（Ciwei） 学校的创始人Sunny Lee指出，到目前为止，对于一个像他这样的无党派人士可以建立一所学校，是难以想象得。他谈到深圳现在是“非政府组织的黄金国”。城市里的广告牌上写着：“公民社会：一起成长”。
But it is slow work. Although some departments have been amalgamated, the main bureaucrats have all kept their jobs, leading to an abundance of deputy directors (which also makes dealing with Beijing difficult). The structure is still complicated: technically only 40,000 people work for the city (teachers, for instance, are separate). Li Luoli of the China Society of Economic Reform points out that the local ministries and developers have been able to ignore Beijing because there is no specific local body behind political reform. A report on how to improve the local people’s congress has been shelved, and talk of an anti-corruption commission has faded.
然而，这是一项进程缓慢的工作。尽管一些部门已经合并，主要的官僚主义者保住了他们的职位，导致大量副主任的产生（这同时使得深圳同北京打交道有困难）。官僚结构仍然复杂：严格地说，仅有4万人为城市工作（例如，教师是分开算的）。中国经济改革社会的Li Luoli指出，由于政治改革缺乏特殊的地方团体支持，一直以来，当地官员和开发商可以忽视北京的命令。一份如何提高当地人民代表大会的报告被束之高阁，反贪污的讨论也销声匿迹。
There is also a deeper cultural problem. Most reformers want to devolve power, but for a government that likes to control things this is hard to accept. The reformers have not been helped by the financial crisis. The failures of Western capitalism have put a spring in the step of the state-owned enterprises, and of state-directed capitalism in general. Shenzhen’s reformers hail Hong Kong as a place where NGOs do a lot of the state’s work, but most of Hong Kong’s civil society is rooted in religion. The Chinese government is unlikely to let churches run schools; indeed, elsewhere in the country Catholic priests have been stopped from setting up networks of parishioners to check on old people, for fear that they might start proselytising.
同时还有更深层次的文化问题。大多数的改革者希望下放权力；但对于一个有控制欲的政府来说，这是难以接受的。金融危机对改革者来说毫无帮助。总得来说，西方资本主义的失败给国有企业和国有导向的资本主义增添了新的活力。深圳的改革者称赞香港的非政府组织可以为香港做很多工作，但是大多数香港民间组织都扎根于宗教。中国政府不大可能让教堂开办学校；事实上，全国各地，天主教牧师一直被禁止建立慰问老人的教区网络，唯恐这些老人改变信仰。
China may aspire to the efficiency of Singapore and Hong Kong, but it is nervous about the idea of a small state. This hesitancy seems to go right to the top. Even though Mr Wen called on Shenzhen to lead the way to reform, Hu Jintao, China’s president, who visited the city a couple of weeks later, did not reiterate the point.
中国也许渴望新加坡和香港的高效，但却对小政府的理念深感不安。这种犹豫不决似乎可以上溯到最高层。即使温家宝呼吁深圳带领政治体制改革，中国主席胡锦涛在数周后访问深圳时却没有重申这一点。
The pressure from below will not go away. Mr Yang’s office may have gone, but online forums now catalogue the country’s bureaucratic disasters, even if they rarely name the guilty parties. Eventually the regime in Beijing will have to embrace government reform with the same gusto as economic reform under Deng.
来自下层的压力不会消失。杨的办公室也许不复存在，然而现在的网上论坛将全国的官僚灾祸进行汇编，即使很少挑明有罪当事人的姓名。最终，北京的政体不得不用当年邓小平改革经济的热情支持政府部门改革。
Until then, whatever Davos man thinks, China will not provide many lessons in government for the rest of the world. If the West wants to improve the way it runs its affairs, it would do better to look to technology and management.
到那时，不论达沃斯峰会上的领导人如何想，中国都不会向全世界提供政府工作的教训了。如果西方国家希望提高处理自家事务的能力，最好还是在技术和管理上用点心思吧。 |
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