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Ethics training for officials too little too late
Source: Xinhua |
November 5, 2011, Saturday
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EDITOR'S note:
Will six hours of pounding ethical principles into resistant brains reshape their ethics for the better?
Will six hours of ethics boot camp elevate anyone's morality and behavior?
Apart from being absurd on the face of it, if it were as easy as that, we would have been overrun by saints since time immemorial.
And yet, as Xinhua reports, every Chinese civil servant must go through at least six hours of ethics training between 2011 and 2015. Although the government explains that the six-hour training is only a small part of a long-term program of ethics education, it's hardly convincing that lessons in themselves would make civil servants think right.
Isn't it ironic that our civil servants, many of whom are Communist Party members, have to swear to be morally upright before they can even be admitted into the Party or the government? If solemn oaths cannot prevent these souls from being corrupted, can the additional six-hour training do better?
Ethical behavior is something one learns from an early age by observation and from absorbing the values of his or her home, school and society.
If that doesn't happen and if those values are skewed, or corrupted, then a few mandatory hours in a classroom can't do much to change it.
Ultimately, the question is who is entitled to judge the ethical standards of our civil servants: their bosses, or the ordinary people? Anything short of answering this question will amount to formalism and lip service.
China will launch an ethics training campaign for all of the country's civil servants over the next five years, according to a statement issued by the State Administration of Civil Service on Wednesday.
All civil servants will be trained by the end of 2015, the last year of China's 12th Five-Year Plan period, and are required to complete a training course of no less than six hours in length, the statement said.
Ethics training should be made a compulsory part of civil servants' job training, the statement said.
The campaign will focus on training leading officials and community-level civil servants who work in direct contact with the public, the statement said.
According to the statement, the training will include lectures and case studies to improve civil servants' loyalty to the country and people, as well as their sense of responsibility and honesty.
Ethics performance will always be an important standard in civil servant selection, assessment and supervision, the statement said.
The training campaign has been launched following the recent exposure of improper behavior and illegal acts by civil servants.
A police officer who was accused of killing five people and injuring three others in an apparent drunken-driving road accident in central China's Henan Province was arrested in late October.
Pan Lei, director of the Suqian Municipal Agricultural Machinery Bureau in east China's Jiangsu Province, was removed from his post in late October over allegations that though married, he had maintained a mistress.
These types of cases have a negative influence on the public's image of civil servants, said Liu Dasheng, a professor with the Jiangsu Administration Institute.
Many regions have already begun to make efforts to improve the moral standards of their civil servants.
The government of Shuyang County in Jiangsu has included "moral qualities" in its civil servant performance evaluation system since 2010.
Most of the investigated officials' behavior has been unethical, said Zhang Fengyang, head of the School of Government at Nanjing University.
Ethics training can help to prevent corruption and appease the public's desire for disciplined civil servants and officials, Zhang said.
Will six hours of pounding ethical principles into resistant brains reshape their ethics for the better?
Will six hours of ethics boot camp elevate anyone's morality and behavior?
Apart from being absurd on the face of it, if it were as easy as that, we would have been overrun by saints since time immemorial.
And yet, as Xinhua reports, every Chinese civil servant must go through at least six hours of ethics training between 2011 and 2015. Although the government explains that the six-hour training is only a small part of a long-term program of ethics education, it's hardly convincing that lessons in themselves would make civil servants think right.
Isn't it ironic that our civil servants, many of whom are Communist Party members, have to swear to be morally upright before they can even be admitted into the Party or the government? If solemn oaths cannot prevent these souls from being corrupted, can the additional six-hour training do better?
Ethical behavior is something one learns from an early age by observation and from absorbing the values of his or her home, school and society.
If that doesn't happen and if those values are skewed, or corrupted, then a few mandatory hours in a classroom can't do much to change it.
Ultimately, the question is who is entitled to judge the ethical standards of our civil servants: their bosses, or the ordinary people? Anything short of answering this question will amount to formalism and lip service.
China will launch an ethics training campaign for all of the country's civil servants over the next five years, according to a statement issued by the State Administration of Civil Service on Wednesday.
All civil servants will be trained by the end of 2015, the last year of China's 12th Five-Year Plan period, and are required to complete a training course of no less than six hours in length, the statement said.
Ethics training should be made a compulsory part of civil servants' job training, the statement said.
The campaign will focus on training leading officials and community-level civil servants who work in direct contact with the public, the statement said.
According to the statement, the training will include lectures and case studies to improve civil servants' loyalty to the country and people, as well as their sense of responsibility and honesty.
Ethics performance will always be an important standard in civil servant selection, assessment and supervision, the statement said.
The training campaign has been launched following the recent exposure of improper behavior and illegal acts by civil servants.
A police officer who was accused of killing five people and injuring three others in an apparent drunken-driving road accident in central China's Henan Province was arrested in late October.
Pan Lei, director of the Suqian Municipal Agricultural Machinery Bureau in east China's Jiangsu Province, was removed from his post in late October over allegations that though married, he had maintained a mistress.
These types of cases have a negative influence on the public's image of civil servants, said Liu Dasheng, a professor with the Jiangsu Administration Institute.
Many regions have already begun to make efforts to improve the moral standards of their civil servants.
The government of Shuyang County in Jiangsu has included "moral qualities" in its civil servant performance evaluation system since 2010.
Most of the investigated officials' behavior has been unethical, said Zhang Fengyang, head of the School of Government at Nanjing University.
Ethics training can help to prevent corruption and appease the public's desire for disciplined civil servants and officials, Zhang said.
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