Perverse incentive

A POLICEMAN in Central China's Hubei Province fabricated a "robbery" in a bid to fulfill the quota required by the bureau.

The man was given a two-year jail term together with a probation of three years.

According to a commentary by Huang Rongcai in the Beijing News, although the scheme was ridiculous, it reflected some unreasonable features of police administration.

The writer said that it had become popular to set up a quota for every policeman every year, which indeed aroused the staff's enthusiasm.

However, Huang said, police work is not streamlined production, which could always be measured quantitatively. No one could predict when crimes would occur, and each case had its own specific characteristics.

Traffic re-think

IT has been reported that some municipal congress deputies in Beijing have sharply criticized mistakes in urban planning that have resulted in heavy traffic in the city.

In his article published in the Beijing News, Deng Yuming compared the layout of the city to a pie. The city was centred on a point, and ring roads were built one by one, which was like trying to enlarge a pie.

Deng said that such an approach had also been picked up in many other cities, yet it had many defects. He noted that such a layout attached too much importance to the city's image but not enough to its function. It necessarily produced problems such as traffic jams, heavy pollution and energy shortages.

According to the writer, the main reason for the problem was that urban planning work had long been regarded as a city's internal matter, rather than a comprehensive issue taking the outskirts into consideration. Accordingly, some indexes - ignoring the rural population - were prone to underestimate traffic levels, leading to unnecessary congestion.

Dubious model

XUZHOU Cigarette Factory has recently been dubbed a model unit in East China's Jiangsu Province.

Liang Yong, a columnist, wrote in the China Youth Daily that it was absurd to give such an honour to a cigarette producer. He said that cigarette production was a declining industry which was not in tune with modern civilization, and was not qualified for such titles.

The writer said that if a cigarette factory achieved greater profits, it did so by bringing more negative effects to society. Although the industry had contributed a lot to the country's revenue, and even become a backbone in some cities' economies, the writer warned that officials should pay more attention to social development. (Star News)