The State Council Wednesday approved the resignation of General Manager Ma Fucai of the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), the country's biggest oil company, over the deadly gas blowout on Dec. 23 last year.

The Dec. 23 gas blowout in southwest China's Chongqing municipality, the recent deadliest industrial disaster of the country claimed the lives of 243 people from toxic fumes when a negligent drilling crew broke open a CNPC gas well and dismantled safety equipment that might have stopped the blowout.

The State Council also asked relevant departments to severely punish those responsible for the blowout as well as for a Lantern Festival stampede in Beijing's suburban Miyun County on Feb. 5, killing 37, and a shopping mall fire in northeast China's Jilin Province that killed 51 people on Feb. 15.

As a matter of fact, shortly after the blowout happened, did the calls from ordinary people demanding high officials responsible to resign for the accident appear in newspapers. Now the State Council's approval of Ma's resignation from a ministerial post once again threw the topic into limelight.

China Youth Daily Wednesday quoted Professor Mao Shoulong from Renmin University by saying that the so-called "affixing the responsibility on high-ranking officials" refers to shouldering responsibility for things one should have done technically but failed to do them. An official should shoulder responsibility in four aspects. First is the moral responsibility, i.e. being responsible for victims and the public; secondly, political responsibility for the ruling party and the government; thirdly, democratic responsibility for the voters and people's representatives who once voted for him and fourthly, legal responsibility for the related laws and it must be found out whether one has committed the dereliction of duty. In this sense, Ma Fucai, as a person in charge of CNPC and an official at the ministerial level, should at first shoulder moral and political responsibilities for the blowout accident.

The scholar at least pointed out an intrinsic feature of the specific act of "taking the blame and resign", that is, an official has to shoulder responsibilities for certain job-related risks in moral, executive, political and other fields even if he didn't make any direct mistake, commit crimes of misconduct in office or break the law. For example, it is neither possible nor necessary for Ma Fucai, as general manager of CNPC, to check by him the security and rescue measures of a specific well belonging to a subsidiary company. So he has no direct responsibility for the happening of the accident. But it is during his leadership that some CNPC staff members failed to take effective safety and rescue measures, which finally resulted in great losses of people's life as well as tremendous moral and economic losses to a state-owned enterprise and put the government at a higher level under certain social pressure. Facing the public, the government, his own department as well as public opinion, Ma can hardy shift the blame onto others while it is a wise choice for him to take the initiative and resign.

In fact, the thought of the resignation for officials who made mistakes has gone deeper even before the accident.

In June 2001 Shenzhen authority published "suggestions on further depending personnel reform", stipulating that "leading cadres who caused great losses by wrong personal decision-making or mistakes in job should take the blame and resign".

On November 20 last year, Sichuan authority unveiled its "temporary measures on leading cadres' taking the blame and resign" in which it has made clear a few cases for cadres to resign under the circumstances.

During the NPC and CPPCC sessions this year, attendees advised to set up a system of blame taking and resignation for civil servants in order to make the government and civil servants responsible for their own acts and prevent the abuse of power.

According to the past practice, media analyzed, hardly an official could be held responsible if his wrong conducts didn't break law or Party disciplines. Now the blame-taking system filled the gap, putting the conducts of officials completely under supervision.

Ma's resignation will certainly become the latest example of the discussion. Some people called that the system should become a normal and common practice in executive operation. But questions follow: how to define acts that are to be blamed? What's that an official's sense of responsibility should contain?

Just as a scholar once put it, the blame-taking system changed people's demanding on and positioning of the public power. Poor management, mediocre performance, inappropriate use of people and wrong decision-making, these are acts which could hardly be investigated in the past but now likely to knock an official off his post. But to make the change really happen the country has to leap over dramatic conceptual and systematic gaps. Questions as how to reconsider the abundant responsibilities contained in executive power and, correspondingly, to whom an official should be held responsible, may come to be focus for the media to pay attention to next time. These are also major questions to be studied in building a responsible government.

By People's Daily Online