By Chen Yong (陈勇)
Page 11
Issue No. 551, Jan 5, 2012
Translated by Zhu Na
Original Article:[Chinese]

 
Cai Qi (蔡奇), the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s organization department in Zhejiang province, calls himself a blogaholic. “Uncle Cai,” as he’s known to the five million followers of his microblog, posts his observations and thoughts daily. He has called himself a “Bolshevik”, “business mentor” and “Appleholic”.

At first, the decision to open a Weibo, or microblog, was a personal choice, unconnected to his work, and Cai dismissed suggestions that he should open an account in his official capacity.

“I want to open a Weibo account, but I don’t want to wear the halo of an official, I just want to express my own opinions,” he explained.

He has been blogging under his real name since May 13, 2010. His first post, sent from his iPhone, promoted the beautiful scenery in Lishui (丽水), a prefecture-level city in southwest Zhejiang, to which Cai wanted to attract tourists.

Since then, his posts have spanned a broad range of themes: his thoughts on current affairs, reflections on life and his ideas on the internet and blogging. When he saw that Barack Obama had given up smoking, he wrote that other leaders should learn from the U.S. President’s example; when British Prime Minister David Cameron moved the time of government meetings so that he could take his children to school, Cai wrote that this was a great example of how government could adapt to more human concerns.

When reports emerged of how the former head of Microsoft in China had falsified his academic qualifications, Cai called for the executive to give his side of the story. When a high-level official working in the Zhejiang legal system hanged himself following a bout of depression, Cai commented that health should always come first.

As well as his personal remarks and observations, Cai also uses his Weibo to answer questions related to his work in the organization department. He says that micro-blogging enables officials to have broader contact with society, to learn about what the public think and to get to know other users.

Cai was followed onto Weibo by one of the province’s vice governers, Zheng Jiwei (郑继伟), and now 90 percent of civil servants in the Zhejiang provincial organization system have personal accounts, while there are official accounts for their offices at city and county level.

Cai joined the Zhejiang organization department after serving as mayor of Hangzhou, the province’s capital, and his first action in his new position was to open his office up to the public. He published his e-mail address in Zhejiang Daily, along with those for 14 other officials and the directors of organization bureaus in other cities.

By doing so, he was continuing an approach that he had developed as mayor, when he occasionally opened up his meetings to deputies from the National People’s Congress and members of the Chinese People’s Consultative Congress. He also used online video to interact with residents and won an award for “Local Government Innovation”.

Cai has tried to banish government jargon from his Weibo account, believing that bureaucratic language is against the spirit and purpose of Weibo.

“[On Weibo] officials must not address people in a bureaucratic tone, but instead be humble and bypass bureaucracy, treating each other equally. This is the unique Internet culture. No one is an exception,” he said.

With China in a period of transition, when social inequality and injustice is rife, many officials are wary of the internet, but Cai believes that the web is unavoidable. As the number of internet users in China approached 500 million, the government can’t ignore their voices.

“It’s only by telling the truth that [China’s] 500 million internet users will understand the government’s hard work and effort,” Cai said.

At a recent government forum on Weibo and innovation in social administration, Cai won acclaim by calling for officials to approach the medium with transparency and openness. He said that this attitude was a kind of reform, but one that people could easily accept given the absence of risks and costs. Telling the truth is better than speaking in bureaucratic jargon.