China's governments at all levels are making efforts to streamline and cut short frequent and long-winded meetings to free officials for substantial work.

A circular issued by the State Council earlier this year instructed governments at all levels to try all means to eliminate unnecessary meetings or cut short meetings. It instructed that meetings should not only have specific discussion themes but also contribute to finding tangible approaches to objectives and solutions to problems.

The implementation of the requirement has been warmly welcomed by the public.

In Liuzhou City, in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, all of the 34 meetings held by the municipal government last year were limited to less than 90 minutes, which saved 186.5 hours of work time and over one million yuan (US$12 million) of expenditure.

Meanwhile, a number of measures have been implemented to help increase efficiency, including tele-conferences and exchanges of opinions via the local media.

An official from the Liuzhou City Government said that in condensed meetings, government officials felt an urgency to concentrate in the limited time, which even improved the quality of the meetings.

He said that with the measures taken, officials were more frequently found in their offices or engaged in field studies to obtain "first-hand" information.

There are all kinds of annual, monthly or weekly meetings held by governments at all levels, which, though necessary occasions for group discussions, have proliferated to the extent of squandering time, human resources and money.

An informal calculation estimated that China's annual expenditure on meetings may exceed 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion), which has become a matter of public complaint.

These extravaganzas have fostered such a bureaucratic work style that some civil servants even consider their principal task to be attending meetings.

This, however, has been tackled with various initiatives. For example, in the election of an administrative post in the provincial government of Guangdong, one of the tests is to submit a proposal for reforming the meeting style. The candidate who can come up with the best solution to streamline meetings will get the post.

The reform of the government meeting style has even become a hot topic on the Internet. A commentator on the net said that meetings will be meaningless if none of consensuses reached in those meetings is implemented. In that case, meetings will become an obstruction to building efficient and pragmatic government organs.

( March 18, 2002)