Chinanews, Beijing, Apr. 4 – China's administrative expenses are the highest in the world. From 1978 to 2003, China's fiscal revenues increased 29-fold, whereas administrative expenses grew by 88-fold. The central government has tried every means, from system design to moral education, in order to drag down the huge administrative costs, but in vain, the Legal Daily reported.
“China has made a relatively complete set of laws and regulations to handle the problem of large waste of public money. However, many of these laws are not strictly obeyed. If people had respected these laws, there wouldn't have been so much extravagance and waste,” an insider said recently.
Feng Pei'en, a CPPCC National Committee member, also cited statistics to illustrate the soaring administrative expenses. From 1986 to 2005, the amount of administrative expenses borne by every Chinese citizen increased 24-fold, while during the same time, Chinese GDP grew only 15.6-fold.
“The surging amount of public expenses is linked with huge waste of public money in some government departments,” he said.
According to a rough calculation, every year more than 100 billion yuan of public money is thrown away in feasting. The amount of money wasted in this way equals the construction cost of the Three Gorges project.
Even much more money is wasted in some “political career achievements projects” and in the construction of local government office buildings. It is revealed that in China, one-fifth of the construction projects in cities and towns are undertaken to show off officials' "political career achievements." In many places, local governments vie with each other in building luxury office buildings.
Statistics show that at present, China has several million cars for government use. About 200 billion yuan is spent every year in buying such cars. However, only one-third of them are really used for handling official duties. The cost of state-owned cars running per ten thousand kilometers is much higher than that of other cars.
Some people refer to the extravagance of public money as the “Chinese-style waste”.
When people spend public money, they are not to be bothered by money problem and they spend as much as they like, some people pointed out.
