After Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered rural poverty eliminated by 2020, bureaucrats in the southwestern city of Mianyang got busy—with paperwork. Instructed to devote 70% of their time to the campaign, they diligently filled out forms certifying compliance, a practice known as “leaving marks,” said Pang Jia, a local judicial clerk who joined the effort. When higher-ups demanded photographic proof of their home visits, some aid workers made up for missing winter photos by posing in cold-weather clothing during summer house calls, Ms. Pang said.
Since taking power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has realigned Chinese politics with his domineering style and a top-down drive to forge a centralized state under the Communist Party. But his efforts are running into an old foe: bureaucracy.
Party observers say the drive for centralization in a sprawling nation too often fosters bureaucratic inertia, duplicity and other unproductive practices that are aimed at satisfying Beijing and protecting careers but threaten to undermine Mr. Xi’s goals.
Indeed, some local officials have become so focused on pleasing Mr. Xi and fulfilling party mandates that they can neglect their basic duties as public servants, sometimes with dire results.
As the new coronavirus spread in Wuhan in late 2019, for instance, local authorities were afraid to share bad news with Beijing. That impeded the national response and contributed to the death toll, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.
Reports of fraudulent and wasteful projects have marred Mr. Xi’s campaign to eliminate rural poverty, a centerpiece of his “China Dream”—particularly after 2015, when he ordered that officials sign pledges to meet poverty-relief targets and be held accountable if things went wrong.
In the eastern city of Fuyang, local officials were disciplined in 2019 for ordering homes in some rural villages to be painted white so that they would look nicer to party bosses—spending the equivalent of $1.2 million—without addressing deficient roads and drainage systems. Party inspectors found that local officials started the “whitewashing” as a way to deliver quick results after higher-ups demanded that residents’ homes be fixed up within three months. Even that project was haphazard, with many houses only partially painted, according to a state television documentary.
Provincial authorities denounced the episode as a vanity project and a highly damaging act of “formalism”—the official epithet for box-ticking and “CYA” behavior that prioritizes form over substance—and replaced Fuyang’s top official.
One grass-roots official complained to the official Xinhua News Agency about not having time to do real work after participating in 15 meetings over 23 days. The agency also quoted a county chief as saying, “If we don’t hold meetings, how do we show that we’ve implemented our work?”
The dangers of box-ticking have worried Communist governments since the days of Stalin and Mao. Historians say Mao was so troubled by the phenomenon that he repeatedly launched campaigns to shake up what he saw as an ossifying and increasingly self-serving party bureaucracy. Today, under Mr. Xi, the