A Thousand Threads from Above, One Needle Below
Covering Chinese policy and rhetoric on external events and actors, military and security issues, economy and technology, and bilateral relations with India.
Guarding the Great Wall: ‘Five Excesses’
An interesting commentary appearing in the 12 August edition of ‘PLA Daily’, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s daily newspaper, discusses “Eradicating the Soil and Conditions that Foster the ‘Five Excesses’ (铲除“五多”滋生的土壤和条件).” The author of the piece is Fu Lingyan, from the Seventh Medical Center of the General Hospital of the PLA.
In a system built closely around political and ideological adherence to the party-state’s authority, phrases like the “five excesses” (五多) are dictum to instruct cadres how better to act in line with this authority. More specifically, its goal is to teach cadres to give up decentralism and bureaucratism, and instead do as little as possible (in terms of regulations and directives) to interfere with direct central command over military forces.
For context, it is important to assess what the phrase ‘Five Excesses’ has meant since the inception of the People’s Republic. As explained in 2019 by an article in the Qiushi journal, the Communist Party’s theoretical mouthpiece:
As early as 1953, Chairman Mao summarized the ‘Five Excesses’ problem reflected in a report by the Northwest Bureau as “too many tasks, too many meetings and training sessions, too many documents and reports, too many organizations, and too many part-time roles for activists.” By the 1990s, the ‘Five Excesses’ generally referred to: “too many meetings, too many official documents, too many workgroups, too many inspections and evaluations, and too many activities initiated by higher authorities.” In recent years… the old ‘Five Excesses’ have decreased, but new forms have emerged, such as “too many seminars, too many training sessions, too much memorization, too many forms, and too many material requests,” which disrupt the normal work and life of the troops.
The big complaint the political elite in the party have with local provincial and grassroots-level leaders, in this regard, is that due their perceived expectation of quick turnaround times in policy implementation, the personal need to gain recognition supersedes quality of work required. Cadres and military officials begin equating large-scale and high-profile events with successful work. Three primary types of concerns have emerged in the PLA, in this regard, and are referred to by Fu Lingyan as “incorrect views of political achievements”:
A document for a document: Local-level officers often prepare outline or guidance documents to explain how to implement central leadership regulations on the PLA’s work. As Fu laments, “some units disregard the ‘true scriptures’ and insist on creating their own redundant policies, methods, and regulations that overlap or even conflict with existing laws and regulations.” Often, it creates what Xi Jinping calls the “high mountains of paperwork,” without actually achieving the intended outcomes highlighted in the central document.
The “Deep Seas of Meetings”: Back-to-back meetings and continuous inspections are a common affair among local officers in the PLA, especially at the group army and brigade-battalion levels. These meetings and inspections often precede central leadership visits or come in response to issuance of certain central regulations regarding norms of military work. This severely disrupts order, interrupts usual work plans, and encroaches on education and training time, rendering some planned tasks ineffective.
Creating Cumbersome procedures: A form for everything sounds well organised but actually makes day-to-day functioning, especially in a huge organisation such as the PLA, extremely arduous. Often, such procedures, as Fu explains, become “signature products promoting individual excellence.” In a system marred with political competition to rise to the top based on legitimacy-bargaining with the political elite, such legacy projects are many in number.
The solution, as both Fu and the Qiushi article propose, is to make work on combat readiness central to the soldiers’ duties. This further requires local leaders to change orientation and rely solely on using combat effectiveness as the standard for evaluating work results. Ideally, a theater commander organising a task force to greet CMC officials during an upcoming inspection tour should count as a wasteful task, but based on ideas alone, it is hard to say if this crosses the line or not. However, local meetings revolving solely around the individual aura and ideals of middle management in the military, certainly does.
A recent example to study the excesses and its eradication in action in the PLA, comes from an inspection standardisation activity conducted in July 2024 in the PLA Southern Theater Command. The inspection working group of an air force base in the STC, conducting an inspection of a platoon in the theater, found that the leader of the platoon, Luo Jie, had documented every task separately, with accompanying photos of activities, discussion notes, attendance sheets, and various responsibility and commitment letters.
When asked about his turmoil to pile the table up, Luo said, “To avoid leaving a bad impression on the authorities, we had to ‘add extra’ to the inspection materials in both content and form, mainly to prevent omissions and highlight achievements.” Such showy and superficial efforts were clearly unacceptable to the inspection team, who’d rather the platoon focused on its combat preparedness work.
To deal with the fault-line, the STC Air Force base apparently established a fault tolerance and correction mechanism. Under this mechanism, middle management in the theater is required to set the content and boundaries of allowable mistakes in work, providing the grassroots (at the lowest levels of soldiers) with opportunities for time-limited rectification based on actual issues, and organizing targeted “review” sessions to verify the rectification. Soldiers had to hence be told it’s okay to make mistakes, which lies at the heart of bureaucratism and formalism in the PLA.
It is also important to note what the highest military decision-maker, Xi Jinping, actually expects of grassroots soldiers. He does not tell them to not engage in meetings, inspections or paperwork at all. But his instruction is for such engagement to be related to combat preparedness, division of labour, and the scientific advancement of work. This is reflected in another article from February 2024, published in ‘Dangjian’ (Party-building) vertical of CPC News, which highlights what the burden of the grassroots should be:
Observe More: At the grassroots level, it is essential to observe closely how party and state policies transition from documents to practical impacts, how grassroots party committees, governments, and various functional departments operate and perform their duties, and how superiors, peers, and subordinates at the posting location make decisions, deploy, and implement tasks.
Listen More: During meetings, listen to colleagues’ reports and discussions, leaders’ summaries and decisions. In daily routines, listen to colleagues’ introductions and reports, and during visits, pay attention to the reflections and voices of cadres and staff. In investigations, genuinely listen to the complaints and demands of the subjects and residents.
Ask More: Ask questions to and seek clarifications from leaders, colleagues, subordinates, and the public. Learn from these questions about experiences, methods, knowledge, ideas, styles, and realms.
Walk More: Young cadres at the grassroots level must not “work behind closed doors,” simply switching offices, and being content with reading documents, attending meetings, and listening to reports. Visit grassroots units or towns (streets), villages (communities) within their purview.
Do More: Young cadres should be fully engaged, taking on tasks and responsibilities according to their division of labor. Prepare well for every speech, host every meeting effectively, participate in every investigation, implement every household visit, verify every report, and write every document well.
There are definitive contradictions in these guidances proposed by Xi, and the message on eradicating the ‘five excesses’. For example, listening and doing more may often mean, especially for young cadres, following the instructions of their leaders in the military middle management, which in turn are themselves vying for higher positions based on legacy projects. The inspection conclusions from the STC Air Force Base should hence act as guiding light for other theater/ brigade commanders/ battalion commanders to see through the division of labour and yield outcomes based on combat efficacy above anything else.
Worldview Weekly: WADA Serves China’s Revenge
Olympic season has officially ended, but not without leaving behind the taste of a geopolitical soup. On August 7, Reuters and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) revealed that between 2011 and 2014, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) may have allowed members of its Olympic team to engage in drug intake before and during competitions even though a “global code” led by WADA dictates that doping is illegal and should not be allowed. At the 2024 Paris Olympics itself, a particular case of men’s 200m track star Erriyon Knighton has made the news, as he was tested positive for banned steroid trenbolone during an out-of-competition test in March 2024, and ranked fourth in the race, the finals for which were held on August 9.
Without delving into names, the WADA story specifies the case of an “elite level athlete,” who competed at Olympic qualifier and other international events in the US and even admitted to taking steroids and EPO. Yet, they were permitted to continue competing till the time they retired. Another case WADA discusses is of USADA never notifying the Agency of its decision to lift an athlete’s provisional suspension for doping.
The story has broken more powerfully in China than perhaps anywhere else in the world, and Chinese state media is having a field day. CGTN, for example, has already engaged in digital poll-taking to assess public sentiment on whether the USADA is guilty of what WADA has accused it of. This survey was reportedly published in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian, with 14,580 netizens participating and sharing their views within 16 hours. Interestingly but not surprisingly (if one is to believe the data), 95.57 per cent respondents believe that USADA might be covering up U.S. athletes involved in doping.
Global Times, too, has undertaken detailed coverage of the issue. More comedically, its most recent cartoon makes quite a statement:
The Chinese interest in the subject is not just about rivalry with the US, but also about previous accusations levied by the USADA against 23 Chinese swimmers who competed at the Tokyo olympics in 2021. There is no denying that all 23 players tested positive for a powerful performance-enhancing drug called trimetazidine (TMZ).
The US claimed that the players continued to swim after the Chinese anti-doping agency (CHINADA) delayed reporting these samples and WADA refused to intervene. Because the swimmers also won medals in competitions at the Olympics (including gold), the US brought up the fact that WADA also received US $2 million in excess funds from the CCP that year.
Both CHINADA and WADA have denied accusations, stating that the reason for the athletes testing positive was that they were “inadvertently exposed to the drug through contamination.” WADA, too, found traces of TMZ in the kitchen of the players’ hotel room. Reportedly, two independent investigations, one by Swiss prosecutor Eric Cottier looking into WADA’s handling of the case, as well as another audit by World Aquatics, revealed that WADA did not engage in mismanagement or cover-ups.
The big challenge here was that the reportage of these incidents pertaining to the swimmers was hushed by both CHINADA and WADA. US lawmakers Raja Krishnamoorthi and John Moolenaar of the ‘House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party’ also took the case up to the International Olympic Committee, and even drafted a letter to the US Department of Justice and the FBI requesting them to use their exterritorial jurisdiction to investigate individuals involved in doping schemes at international sports competitions. Today, the shadow of the case hangs over the US-China sporting rivalry.
The US now stands at interesting cross-roads. The IOC has reportedly informed USADA that its failure to comply with WADA norms will result in its disqualification as host of the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Chinese media is likely to milk the most of this issue in this news cycle, casting doubts on any scope for reprieve in tensions between the two sides.
Latest from the Indo-Pacific Studies Team:
To begin with, in this podcast episode of ‘All Things Policy’, Manoj Kewalramani and Anushka Saxena, discuss the conclusions of the Third Plenum, and explain why they matter to India.
Next, Amit Kumar, in his latest Opinion piece for Nikkei Asia, weighed in on the debate, ‘Can India be the next China?’.
Finally, Manoj Kewalramani appeared on an interview with The Neon Show to discuss his time in China, India’s China strategy, and more. Tune in to this interesting conversation below:
Following up from our previous edition, I once again encourage you to participate in our latest Survey, ‘The China Challenge Survey’.
The Survey is prepared by the Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy. This is the first iteration of an intended periodic Survey to assess public opinion on India-China relations.
Filling out the Survey should not take more than 5 minutes of your time. Please only fill the same out only once. Responses shall be accepted till 31 August 2024, 11:59 PM IST.
Please note that any and all information provided through the Survey will be completely confidential. Please also note that by submitting your responses, you are authorising Takshashila Institution to use the information provided for research, analyses and/ or educational purposes.
In case of any queries, please reach out to us via contact@takshashila.org.in, or using the comments space below the text of this edition.
Eye on China is a weekly newsletter curated by the Indo-Pacific Studies Programme at The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think-tank based out of Bengaluru, India.
 | A guest post by
|