EO: Recently there have been a lot of people advising the State Council's institutions to reform, does your reform plan have any special suggestions here?

Shi: After the the suggestions came out, we solicited feedback from officials and experts. They said it was a good plan, but too difficult to put in practice. So later, we created two versions, a theoretical one that changed the State Council's 28 departments into 18—big changes, especially considering that we eliminated the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Partial data shows that the State Council currently has over 80 overlapping units, with the most resulting from the NDRC. How much power does the NDRC have? Almost nothing is untouched by it. The power to approve projects, the power to set policy, why is it so focused? Where many powers can be be given to specific ministries, many of them are empty and have no power to set policy. The realistic plan that we submitted brought the number down to 21. In both versions, we broke things into big departments-- health, transportation, energy, agriculture, etc.

EO: But it seems that this and the reform plan that most people talk about is not too different?

Shi: Maybe from a departmental view, 18 or 21 of them seems the same as what other people are suggesting, but they are definitely different. We followed the Hong Kong governments setup, last October, I personally led a team there and to Macau to evaluate them. They both have three wings of government devoted to policymaking, and below that, 68 are all policy-enforcing organs.

EO: Won't having such large departments lead to the same kind of culture of secrecy that happened before?

Shi: It won't, this is something we've already thought of. In reforming the system, of course the end result is critical, but the key is how those important parts connect to each other. In the whole framework, we broke everything down into four categories: political, economic, social, and supervisory. And within each department, policy organs and enforcement organs are split up, in order to try hard to realize the mutual balancing and separation of powers over policymaking, enforcement, and supervision. At the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner we will release the scheme to the public.