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His shoes are clean but sacked official shows fundamental lack of shame
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THERE is an old saying in China, “one cannot always keep his shoes dry if he walks along the river.”
But there is indeed someone who managed to cross a river dry-footed, because he didn’t have to move about on his own.
Torrential rains that recently lashed a swath of southern China caused rivers to overflow. On June 20, three schoolgirls fell into a river in Guixi City, Jiangxi Province, on their way to school. One drowned and two others went missing.
What started as a tragedy soon morphed into a scandal after the disgraceful behavior of two local officials reportedly involved in a search-and-rescue operation.
A local netizen posted pictures on a personal weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, that show a man wading through a puddle, carrying another man piggyback. The caption said it all: “The one (official) on top ordered a piggyback ride for fear of soiling his name-brand leather shoes in the water!”
The man who was given a piggyback ride turned out to be Wang Junhua, deputy head of a local government office. The other was his subordinate, surnamed Ding.
Another picture the netizen posted showed that a rescuer was up to his neck in muddy water, trying to search for the two missing girls. The contrast immediately created a furor, with angry online commenters castigating the duo, especially Wang, for not going into the water himself.
Owing to the online expose, Wang lost his job the following day. He later regretted his faux pas and said it was Ding who offered to give him a piggyback and he foolishly accepted.
Similar adulatory practices of subordinates fawning on their superiors are not unusual in China, yet the saga of this piggyback ride is a strikingly shameful reminder of the sorry state of affairs within Chinese bureaucracy. How can we trust a politician who didn’t even bother to roll up his trousers and wade in muddy water with more arduous tasks?
Shoes or title?
Curiously, the official weibo of the Jiangxi provincial government began to disown Wang quickly after the revelation. It carried a sarcastic post saying “water didn’t sodden his shoes. Instead, it invaded his brains. As expensive as a pair of shoes are, they are worth far less than the official title.”
Shoes or official title? It doesn’t strike one as a hard trade-off.
Wang, the sacked official, probably wouldn’t have had difficulty making the politically correct choice in hindsight.
That he chose otherwise says a lot about the swagger he — and many of his peers — habitually commands and the subservient role to which his inferiors willingly reduce themselves.
As a matter of fact, officials’ fall from grace over such minor misconduct is not unprecedented.
Tricky ‘inspection’ trip
Past cases could have served as a warning to the likes of Wang.
In October, when much of Yuyao City, Zhejiang Province, was under water after Typhoon Fitow hit, a middle-ranking official at a township government paid an “inspection” trip to the flood-stricken areas, and for fear of getting his luxury shoes wet, he asked a 60-something village cadre to carry him piggyback all the way to the flooded homes of local families. As a result, he saved the shoes, but lost the job.
The fact that an official’s mistake was repeated by a fellow cadre less than a year later suggested that either Wang didn’t watch news very often or he didn’t care. What happened to others won’t necessarily happen to me.
Scant awareness of what damage the Internet can do made him oblivious to the necessity of mending ways that would land him in trouble.
In an age when every citizen, armed with only a smartphone and a weibo, can be a gravedigger of officials’ careers, one ignores possible bad publicity at his or her own peril.
What is more interesting yet less mentioned about this piggyback episode is the almost farcical norm that officials have to make an appearance where disasters hit. Their commitment to relief work is largely oral, not manual, professed through “on-the-spot” instructions given on relief efforts rather than really getting their hands dirty.
In fact, considering that they need to be kept company and accorded proper pomp wherever they go and “inspect,” their presence at disaster-stricken sites is often meddlesome — not helping matters but slowing things down.
Take Wang. What possible good can it serve for someone like him, who didn’t even deign to wet his beloved shoes, to appear on site and direct relief work? All he did was steal the spotlight from the two hapless missing girls. Only when there is less of such unnecessary, even counterproductive official involvement can we really agree that our governments are minding the right business.
People’s Daily editorialized on Monday that it’s hard to nurture a cadre. To be an official requires a keen sense of shame and gratitude. The disgraced official in Jiangxi indicated that this quality is still lacking in many of our officials.
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