By Xu Weiming (许伟明)
News, cover
Issue No. 553, Jan 16, 2012
Translated by Zhu Na
Original Article: [Chinese]

On the morning of Jan 7, as the first session of the Maoming municipality's Eleventh People's Congress got under way, the session began, as most congresses do, with the Mayor Liang Yimin (梁毅民) presenting the annual government work report to delegates.

"He looked back at the work that the government had done over the past year, and went through the list item by item, noting how much progress had been made on such-a-such a project, providing the delegates with a very detailed account.

The mayor also reeled off some numbers, noting that of the 102 tasks that the city government had set itself last year, 92 had been completed, which meant that the government had achieved a completion rate of 90.2 percent," Su Yuming (苏育明), a deputy to the Maoming People's Congress, recalled.

In the audience, the 457 delegates to the local congress read along from copies of the report that they had in front of them as they listened to the mayor.

"Due to various reasons, ten small projects such as the construction of the Southern Maoming and the Maoming Port sewage treatment plants have not been completed on schedule. On behalf of the municipal government, I offer my sincerest apologies to all the representatives," after saying this, Mayor Liang left his seat and bowed towards both the other officials on the stage and the representatives in the audience.

This sudden apology stunned all the representatives in the audience - they had never experienced anything like it before. 

"It was quite unexpected, no-one knew what to do. After a while someone began to applaud, and then everyone followed their lead and applauded," Su Yuming recalled.  
"After the clapping died down, I began to think, should we be applauding the mayor for apologizing? I didn't know whether it was right or wrong to applaud, well that's what I felt at the time anyway."

One official told us that from a delegate's point of view, the mayor's apology is a sign that he is accepting responsibility for his failings, but from the government's perspective, the mayor's apology, means extra pressure - "this year's government work report has listed 106 tasks to be completed, these 106 must be completed, or else the mayor will have to apologize yet again."

Mayor Liang was appointed as to the position of vice party secretary and acting mayor of Maoming, a city in Guangdong province in Feb 2011, and was officially installed as Mayor one month later. 

The former party secretary of the city, Luo Yinguo (罗荫国), was taken away for questioning in February last year on suspicion of corruption and his case has now been passed on to prosecutors who will charge him with crimes of accepting bribes and for not being able to account for property in his possession. The city's former Mayor Zhou Zhenhong (周镇宏) has also just been taken away by Communist Party investigators on suspicion that he too is involved in corruption. Yang Guangliang (杨光亮), the former vice-mayor of Maoming, was also convicted of taking more than 50 million yuan in bribes late last year.