At first they were ministries under the State Council. Then they were degraded to bureaux under the administration of the State Economic and Trade Commission (SETC) in 1998.
Now they have vanished.
All the SETC-administered industrial bureaux, with the exception of the State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau, have been dismantled in a major government streamlining effort, Minister Sheng Huaren announced Monday.
Sheng, head of the influential State Council department, said the functions of the eliminated agencies have been merged into the departments of his commission, whose staff expanded from 450 to 750 workers.
The affected agencies, placed under Sheng's command in 1998, include the state bureaux of internal trade, coal, machinery-building, metallurgical, petroleum and chemical, light, textile, building materials and nonferrous metal industries.
The shift is no surprise.
"All were set to be phased out in a three-year transitional plan," Sheng said. "Now is that time. Conditions are ripe to dissolve them."
The move helps to improve the country's administrative and management regime, which is adapting to the socialist market economic system, and also cuts down on overlapping jobs in the SETC, the minister said.
Analysts noted the structural changes come weeks after China announced that most of its previously loss-incurring state-owned enterprises had reversed into black.
The analysts hailed the roles of the former bureaux in smoothing the three-year effort to eliminate state firm losses.
The changes will improve work efficiency, prevent governmental interference in the daily operation of the enterprises and beef up macro-economic control, Sheng said. All are factors that helped state businesses halt its money-losing ways, he said.
Sheng's commission has offered jobs to only a quarter of the affected 1,200 civil servants in the former nine bureaux.
The rest were dispatched to work in other government departments, enterprises or trade confederations.
Sheng said the State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau remains intact because the State's governance over tobacco will continue for a long while.
"The solution for the tobacco bureau is to reinforce its management functions, while turning the China National Tobacco Corp into a more market-oriented enterprise," he said.
(China Daily 02/20/2001)
