新书推荐 | 高洁：《Work Safety Regulation in China》
Work Safety Regulation in China
The CCP's Fatality Quota System
作者：高洁
出版：Routledge 出版社
时间：2022年4月
简介
01
Fatality quotas implemented in China’s industrial sector and local governments are being used to promote work safety and therefore, reducing the number of work-related deaths. Given the controversial nature of this policy, Gao analyzes how the fatality quotas are functioning to aid the country in balancing economic growth and social stability. The book also examines significant implications caused of this policy’s implementation in the local regions, and reveals how local officials attempt to handle these problems.
This is the first book to systematically examine the role of death indicators in work safety improvement in contemporary China, revealing insight into Beijing’s quota-oriented approach to policy-making.
目录
02
Chapter 1|25 pages
Introduction
Chapter 2|38 pages
Blood-Soaked GDP?
Chapter 3|27 pages
China's Work Safety Management System
Chapter 4|21 pages
A Pony Too Small for the Big Cart
Chapter 5|25 pages
The Fatality Quota System
Chapter 6|28 pages
Why the Fatality Quotas?
Chapter 7|33 pages
Has Work Safety Improved?
Chapter 8|21 pages
Conclusion
各章摘要
03
Chapter 1 Introduction
Abstract: China's socioeconomic transformation since the late 1970s has brought a new generation of governance challenges for national leaders. Well aware of the problem, Chinese Communist Party leaders have made various efforts to reform the work safety regulatory system in the post-Mao era. The fatality quota system was a key pillar of China's work safety management system during the Hu-Wen administration. The rationale behind the system's design needs to be understood within the broader context of China's reform and transformation: the system constitutes a microcosm of China's governance-by-targets regime, a legacy from Mao's time and newly developed in the reform era. A particularly noteworthy contribution is the study of R. Fisman and Y. Wang, which examines the correlation between the fatality quota system and officials' incentives to manipulate safety data so as to get better promotion chances. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
04
Chapter 2 Blood-Soaked GDP?
Abstract: By comparison, in the reform era through 2004, work-related fatalities were mainly caused by changes in the economic structure during China's transition and overemphasis on Gross domestic product (GDP)-centered development. It was reported that in 2005, when Li Yizhong took office as the director of the State Administration of Work Safety, he determined to “cleanse China's blood-soaked GDP with an iron fist”. Examining China's work safety record in the post-Mao era is no less challenging. During 1953–1977 when statistics on different types of coal mine fatalities were available, fatalities in the state-owned key and local coal mines accounted for 90 percent of all deaths. China's composite score for road transportation fatalities was 7.6, fourth after South Africa, India, and Thailand. The average fatality rate per 100,000 people employed in the industrial and mining enterprises in the 10 developed economies was 4.25.
05
Chapter 3 China's Work Safety Management System
Abstract: This chapter begins by describing three groups of key actors in China's work safety management system: the leading agent, the management agent, and the monitoring agent. The changes in work safety were an incremental and experimental process of breaking through the socialist state command system and developing a modern regulatory system that would function according to market forces and the rule of law. Li Yizhong, a former director of the State Bureau of Work Safety, suggested five stages: launching, setback during the Cultural Revolution, restoration, reorientation under the market economy, and innovation. The restructuring and abolishment of the industrial ministries started with the 1993 institutional reforms and went into full swing in 1998. In the 1998 institutional reforms, nearly all the industrial professional economic departments were either abolished or reorganized into new institutions, and the remaining industrial ministries no longer directly managed the enterprises. Legislation on labor and work safety affairs moved into a new stage in the 1990s.
06
Chapter 4 A Pony Too Small for the Big Cart
Abstract: At the national level, the most important measures included separating the work safety agencies from the State Economic and Trade Commission and granting them authority to regulate work safety management. This chapter finds that the work safety regulatory system in the early 2000s was plagued by three thorny issues. First, the regulatory system was highly compartmentalized. Second, State-owned enterprise (SOE) regulation became more difficult because the level of the SOE needed to be taken into consideration. Third, work safety agencies lack de facto power and adequate resources to confront local authorities if the two parties' goals on safety management diverge. The chapter discusses the three issues—compartmentalization, the conflict between tiaotiao and kuaikuai, and the surrender of administrative discretionary power to local politics—are perpetual problems in China's reforms. Managing work safety by territories goes against the traditional system of managing work safety by the level of the SOE.
075
Chapter 5 The Fatality Quota System
Abstract: The fatality quota system gets around the tension between central and local politics in work safety management: under the territory-based management principle, the national leaders needed to find a way to induce local leaders to make genuine efforts to improve work safety management. By comparison, the 2003 institutional reform significantly increased the political status and power of the work safety agencies, which in turn played a leading role in launching the fatality quota system. The fatality quotas are implemented locally through a target-based performance measurement system. In Chinese official terminology, the system is referred to as the target responsibility system (TRS). Given this broad policy context, it was logical that the TRS should be used to bring about changes in work safety when the number of work-related deaths soared in the early 2000s. China's TRS has some distinctive features not found in most Western performance management systems, features that can also be observed in the work safety responsibility system.
08
Chapter 6 Why the Fatality Quotas
Abstract: The way the fatality quotas were established and distributed in the hierarchy greatly reduced the discretion and flexibility that local leaders had in bargaining with their superiors in setting the performance targets. This chapter shows that although the fatality quota system had a weirdly rigid management design, it was a sensitive and expedient political instrument that reduced work-related deaths during a specific historical period. The first striking feature of the fatality quota system is that all indicators were expressed in extremely precise numbers. The second feature of the fatality quota system was that it took regional disparities and sectoral differences into consideration when assessing a locality's performance on fatality control. The third striking feature of the fatality quota system is that it links measurable performance to clearly defined responsibilities of local leaders. To begin with, the fatality quota system provided a consistent and clearer understanding of how the veto power should be applied in assessing work safety performance.
09
Chapter 7 Has Work Safety Improved?
Abstract: This chapter examines the aspects of China's changing landscape of work-related fatalities: changes in overall national fatality numbers; the changes in fatalities in industrial, mining, commercial, and trade industries and road transportation; and the changes in work-related accidents. The decline in fatalities in road transportation accidents follows the same trend observable in overall fatalities. A key goal of the fatality quota system was to reduce the numbers of work-related accidents. In 2006, the number of very serious accidents was added to the quota system. Given that the first goal of the fatality quota system is to reduce fatalities in work-related accidents, there is little doubt that China's work safety situation, if measured by work-related fatalities and accidents, has greatly improved. Coal mines had a large number of serious and very serious accidents, and most cases of data manipulation that were discovered were related to coal mines.
10
Chapter 8 Conclusion
Abstract：The fatality quota system is the product of a particular historical context. Three factors led to its implementation: the ineffectiveness of the existent work safety management system, strong political will to reduce work-related deaths, and a convenient, low-risk policy instrument in the reformers' toolkit. The fatality quota system put new wine in old bottles: it adopted the conventional design of the target responsibility system (TRS) to strengthen local policy compliance, but it added new ingredients of coerciveness that were not widely applied in the TRS in other social-policy areas. During the past two decades, a large body of literature in China studies has centered on discussion of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime resilience. The TRS is one such carefully crafted innovation. While the CCP used campaigns to mobilize the cadres in the past, in the post-Mao era, such mobilizations can be achieved by prioritizing certain tasks in local TRS schemes.
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