Party timeAn overhaul of China’s bureaucracy enhances the party’s authority

“WOW!” That was what China’s state-owned flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, claimed ordinary citizens thought about an elaborate government shake-up, announced on March 13th, which will axe, merge, reorganise or create 26 ministries and departments. In truth, the reaction of many young Beijingers was lighthearted. They started taking selfies outside ministries that are soon to vanish.

Still, the newspaper’s enthusiasm was understandable. In the past 35 years the structure of the Chinese government has been reformed seven times, roughly every five years. The only change on anything like this scale happened in 1998 under a tough-as-nails prime minister, Zhu Rongji, who closed or merged 15 ministries. The changes unveiled by the current, less combative prime minister, Li Keqiang, are the biggest since then, and perhaps since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

The Chinese government has long been a behemoth. Even after the reshuffle it contains 47 ministries or departments with ministerial rank. Most rich countries have about 20. Not surprisingly, duelling bureaucracies are rife. The main point of the reorganisation, said Liu He, the chief economic adviser to Xi Jinping, the president, is that “only one department will be responsible for one task.”

In practice that means scrapping or merging 15 ministries and departments and creating or expanding 11 others. The most important new ones are a powerful environment ministry, which will unite control of air, water and soil pollution, now divided among several ministries; and a financial commission which merges the banking and insurance regulators.

Curbing pollution and debt are two of Mr Xi’s priorities. He is also trying to export China’s soft power, which explains the creation of a new aid agency and a new culture ministry, both with expanded responsibilities. Otherwise the reshuffle is about streamlining. Different ministries used to be in charge of responding to natural disasters, depending on what sort of disaster it was (one for earthquakes, another for floods). Now there will be a single emergencies ministry. The reshuffle shows signs of mimicking the United States with a new ministry of veterans affairs and a cabinet-level immigration bureau (not that China has many immigrants). Happily, some powers of the coercive family-planning bureaucracy, which implements population-control policies, will either be scrapped or reassigned to an expanded health commission.

The biggest loser is a body called the National Development and Reform Commission. Once an economics super-ministry, it will see six of its main powers (including setting policy on climate change, competition and health-care pricing) shifted elsewhere, not only to other ministries but also to an institution which sits between the government and the Communist Party. This is called the “leading small group for comprehensively deepening reform”. Mr Xi chairs it and Mr Liu is on it. Like other leading groups, it is an instrument of control for Mr Xi and the party.

That in turn suggests a broader trend behind the reshuffle: the supremacy of party over government. As Mr Liu wrote about the reshuffle in People’s Daily, “Strengthening the party’s overall leadership is the core issue.” Two days before it discussed the revamp, the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament, whose latest, unusually eventful session began in Beijing on March 5th, approved Mr Xi’s plan to scrap term limits for the presidency by 2,964 votes to two.

But it may not necessarily follow that because politics is retreating into command-and-control mode, economic policy will too. Mr Xi is promising a new burst of “reform”, although admittedly he does not always use that term to mean more market liberalisation. Doubtless the party’s control will be tightened. But some of the governmental changes could also portend real improvements, for example better environmental and financial regulation. If so, that will be more a case of “Phew” rather than “Wow”.