SHANGHAI WILL HAVE NO FUTURE IF WE DON’T OVERCOME BUREAUCRATISM1
JANUARY 31, 1991
This article could be entitled “The Compendium of Bureaucratic Behavior.” Alas, Shanghai! If you don’t reform, you’re done. Please send this article to everyone involved in the “black box” and have them read it. (If there are 10,000 people, print 10,000 copies. The city government will pay for this.) Have them discuss it and ask: if we go on like this, can Pudong be developed? Would Shanghai have a future? Then have Ye Longfei2 and Yang Changji3 take an axe to this. I hope the axing won’t take several years and turn into another “black box.” I would only offer this word of warning: why do we always make things hard for ourselves?
Zhu Rongji
A directive criticizing bureaucratic behavior, January 31, 1991.
1. On January 12, 1991, Supplement No. 1 of Internal Materials, published by the research office of the Shanghai Party Committee, carried a report titled “A Preliminary Analysis of the ‘Investment Black Box’ and Some Suggestions.” The “investment black box” was a narrative about the prolonged and complicated application process foreign investors had to go through in order to start basic construction after their projects had been approved. The report included many examples showing that foreign investors had to go through as many as 100 procedures and obtain as many as 100 chops during this phase; it dissected the significance of the “investment black box” and its negative impact, analyzed its features and causes, and offered nine suggestions for standardizing it, making it open and transforming the “black box” into an “open box.” This is the directive Zhu Rongji wrote on the report.
3. Yang Changji was then executive deputy head of the leading group on Pudong’s development and also director of the Pudong Development Office.