THE RESEARCH OFFICE OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT SHOULD BECOME THE MAYOR’S BRAIN TRUST1
JUNE 15, 1988
The caliber of the staff at the city government’s research office is quite good. You’re in your prime and very capable, and the areas of your expertise also make quite a lot of sense [for the work you’re doing.] A considerable number of you studied economics, and quite a few majored in Chinese; some studied technology, but there aren’t enough of those. That’s all right: you’re young and eager to learn. By studying more and gaining more experience, you can become well-rounded talents.
The city government research office should become the mayor’s brain trust. It should serve the mayor and provide all types of information and policy options relevant to the mayor’s decisionmaking. That is what Mayor Li Ruihuan of Tianjin did: he has a team of over 20 people who do research all day. That’s the kind of agency I want, one that studies the various issues the mayor needs to think about and decide upon. Of course there are some questions I haven’t thought of. You can raise these with me and you can investigate them if I approve.
The research office should have three functions: information input, information processing, and information output.
1. Information Input
At present we have to deal with vast quantities of information from inside and outside the country, inside and outside the city, and inside and outside the government. Besides participating in all sorts of activities every day, I have to read a great many documents, other materials, and letters from the people, and have to digest volumes of information. Without intelligence and information, I can’t survive and will be unable to make correct decisions. However, my greatest headache is not having enough time for this task. There are many long articles and essays I don’t have time to read. You can help me by reading, by providing me with all sorts of useful perspectives and information—that would be the greatest help to me. If you read a book, condense its main ideas into a very short essay so that by reading that I will have essentially read the book.
Of course it won’t be easy to sort everything out well. According to my line of thought, you should collect and organize perspectives on various types of information that you think deserve attention from the mayor, including information from economic and business circles in China and other countries, from government agencies, and from the general populace—that would be a great help to me. Collect and store the information: this office should order many periodicals, it should have all the major domestic and foreign periodicals.
2. Information Processing
The information you provide should be processed information. Currently, “Shanghai Briefing”2 is primary unprocessed information that contains too few “nutrients.” You should also offer some ideas for decisionmaking. That is, you should frequently engage in discussions on some major issues, coming up with new ideas through brainstorming, through mutual arguments, and mutual inspiration. Take the question of whether poultry prices should be increased. I visited Qingpu last Saturday and had discussions with county officials—it was very illuminating. At the top levels, what we hear is that prices must be increased because otherwise producers would have no motivation and there’d soon be no poultry. But the unanimous opinion of the county officials was that prices should not be increased, that current purchase prices are already high enough to encourage the farmers to produce. It’s also helpful for promoting production if poultry is a bit less expensive and demand is great. Moreover, the grain conversion rate of poultry is quite high: 2 jin3 of grain can produce 1 jin of poultry meat, whereas it takes 5 jin of grain to produce 1 jin of pork. It’s very economical to change the composition of our food by eating more poultry.
In thinking about finance and trade, we cannot limit ourselves to the old way of raising prices when goods are in short supply and lowering them when goods are overabundant. We must consider how to meld wholesale and retail well. When studying this question, it’s hard for departments to think in terms of the big picture. For instance, the city’s office of finance and trade thinks it’s not possible to have an end-to-end chain for the rural populace, but in fact the farmers are suggesting that they come to the city to sell vegetables and that they receive subsidies [for doing so]—this is worth considering. Thus service quality and attitudes would improve and urban residents would have fresh vegetables to eat. This sort of issue needs policymaking by the mayor that looks at things from the level of the big picture: you should conduct feasibility studies and propose options. Henceforth, major policies of the city government should first be proposed by the vice mayor in charge and approved by the mayor before being presented for discussion at a city government meeting. The Municipal Party Committee will be the final arbiter.
A group photo taken after attending a study meeting of the Party branch of the Shanghai municipal government’s Research Office, December 13, 1990. Front row: from the left, Zhang Linjian, deputy director of the General Office of the municipal government; Yu Lin, associate consultant to the General Office; and Shi Huiqun, director of the Research Office. Zhu Zhanliang, associate consultant to the Research Office, is on Zhu’s left.
I now increasingly feel the need for such an agency to help me carry out research, policy research from a macro and big-picture perspective—from now on, you at the city government’s research office should be doing this. For some questions, you can, on my behalf, organize [other] research bodies to undertake studies, then summarize the results and report to me.
3. Information Output
After a policy is decided upon, there is still the matter of execution. At present, nobody acknowledges anyone else’s authority, nobody can persuade anyone else, and many things are delayed. Once a decision is made, forceful administrative measures must be used to push implementation through. First, we should explain things clearly, cite chapter and verse, and truly win over everyone at the theoretical level. You at the research office must help me write essays—essays that are brilliantly written, that thoroughly explain the reasoning from theory to its integration with practice.
For the past few months that I’ve been working in Shanghai, I’ve mainly been dealing with the most pressing matters; my work has been quite specific and has had some impact. If I hadn’t focused on details early on, today’s situation wouldn’t be so good. It now appears that we must gradually shift to the macro and to major policies: we must come up with a complete set of major measures to drive Shanghai’s economic growth. In keeping with the line of thought and viewpoints in my remarks, you should undertake in-depth research, form complete lines of thought, and produce essays.
1. These are Zhu Rongji’s main remarks at a meeting of the Party branch of the city government’s research office.
2. “Shanghai Briefing” was a bulletin on developments in the city and among the people along with information related to Shanghai that was compiled by the Shanghai city government’s research office. Its main mission was to selectively edit comments, reports, criticisms, and suggestions about Shanghai from various domestic and international sectors, as well as major domestic and international events and major trends that had reference value for work in Shanghai.
3. One jin is equal to 0.5 kilogram.