The Vanishing Envelopes of China

Looking at Chinese progress throughout the last two decades, it looks as if it has a very competent government and public service generally. Now, this story in the NYT is one that reminds about the ridiculous things that happen in that otherwise impressive economic growth story. It chronicles the life of Xue Longlong and the loss of his certificates due to what officialdom describes as misplacement and which increasingly looks like something really corrupt. As the story states, it appears that the ability to validate academic qualifications rests entirely with public sector workers and that records throughout a student's career are kept in a single file kept throughout one's life. The risk associated with these seem to escape the bureaucracy or perhaps some in its understand that once all the records are in one place, then it is easier to purvey them corruptly.

To my mind, this suggests a simple lesson that should be clear to any bureaucracy. Highly centralized systems may appear effective in getting people to do big building projects but it is not necessary to keep the record of millions of students in one place and in a single institution. I am at a loss when I consider China's population and imagine that any one person's records can only be verified through a single office. This is a failure of centralization taken too far because academic qualifications should be verifiable from the institutions that offered the courses. In which case, there would be a distributed network of offices bearing different records that could be used to build a composite picture. To my mind, there's good reason for the rise of a number businesses that would reliably verify academic qualifications.

The most surprising bit is that the China's private sector continues to rely upon the public officers to confirm individual capability when it ought to be clear to them that these are corrupt. The best way out is for them to show less respect for the brown manila envelope an ask Mr. Xue Longlong's University to verify his academic qualification. To continue to insist on the production of that Brown envelope allows the corrupt market to thrive.