Forced government paper subscription still devouring village funds in China

Nearly four years after a ban on compulsory government newspaper subscription, many people in China's rural areas are being forced by local officials to shell out a portion of their wages on propaganda they do not read.

Low-ranking government staff and teachers in the countryside are finding annual subscription fees of hundreds of yuan being deducted from their already paltry salaries, according to a central government supervisory office in Beijing, entrusted with the task of enforcing the ban.

A county school in southwestern China reportedly ordered its 180 teaching staff to pay an annual subscription fee of 168 yuan for local government newspapers. And a dozen teachers in Luohe City, central Henan Province, were barred from having their annual work performance review, thereby losing any chance of a salary bonus or promotion, after protesting against similar charges.

Most Chinese newspapers and magazines were completely run by governments and Party committees as recently as decades ago. Besides state funding, compulsory subscription schemes used to be a vital means for these papers to expand readership and generate profits.

As more government departments began to tap into the business by issuing their own publications, low-income families in rural areas began to protest.

In late 2003, the central government ordered the cancellation of mandatory subscription of government and Party newspapers and journals. By March 2004, 680 papers had been canceled, 325 state-run papers had been transferred to commercial newspaper groups and 94 widely-distributed official journals became free of charge.

There are no figures regarding the number of newspapers that continued to rely on forced subscription but the campaign removed nearly 1.8 billion yuan (231 million US dollars) in subscription fees from the countryside.

But now compulsory subscription is creeping back into the lives of villagers, particularly in the provinces and autonomous region of Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia.

The supervisory office in Beijing said it has received a surge in the number of complaints from villagers in recent months.

In Chengde county, northern Hebei Province, a village head complained that his village, with a population of less than 1,000, was given 4,000 yuan for administration costs by the local government. However, nearly 38 percent of these village funds had to be spent on mandatory subscription.

"In fact, some newspapers print almost the same stories, and some are virtually useless to us, but we are ordered to subscribe to them and cannot just say no," said the village head, who asked to speak under anonymity.

The average subscription fee for medium-sized villages, which usually have a population of 500 to 1,000, in Wutai county of Shanxi Province has grown to an annual fee of 5,000 yuan. The administrative budget for each village is, however, around 11,000, the Beijing office found.

Village teachers are reportedly bombarding the Beijing supervisory office with phone calls to air their complaints but assistance does not come quickly.

Details of the complaints were not revealed by the office staff, who said they were in the middle of investigations.

However, a spokesman did say, "Unscrupulous local officials who ignore the central government's ban on compulsory subscriptions will receive severe punishments."

Source: Xinhua