Most days I walk to the Friendship Store, the big government-owned shop near where I live in Beijing, to buy the International Herald Tribune which comes in about 5.30 p.m. It costs 22 yuan, about £2, but is essential reading for world news in a country where local newspapers are heavily censored. The paper is displayed in a rack in the book section.
I take a copy and pay for it. Would that it were that simple! I take a copy and hand it to an assistant. He or she puts it aside and writes the details of my purchase and the price in triplicate, using two tiny bits of carbon paper. I then take the three pieces of flimsy paper to a cashier in a different part of the store, where there is inevitably a queue. When my turn comes, the cashier stamps each paper separately, then puts one aside for the records, detaches another, then (I am not making this up) takes a glue pot and brush and laboriously sticks on a fourth piece of paper - the actual receipt - and hands it back to me along with the third piece of paper.
I return to the book section, where sometimes another queue has formed, and present the bits of paper to the assistant who keeps one of them, and hands me back the other with my newspaper, which by then has been put in a paper bag by yet another shop worker.
This ludicrous procedure to pay for a simple newspaper is typical of communist bureaucracy, which is designed to keep people in jobs rather than create efficiency.
It is not universal by any means in Beijing. Within a short walk of the Friendship Store there are shops and stalls doing business briskly and efficiently without all the paper pushing, but most of them, of course, are privately owned.
The official bureaucracy provides work for armies of shop assistants, and countless bureaucrats who in the evenings must match up all the thousands of bits of paper. The continuation of this system in modern China makes a mockery of the order by the Prime Minister, Mr Zhu Rongji, in March that all ministries and central government departments, including the one which runs the Friendship Store, should work out plans by this weekend to cut their payrolls to reduce red tape and increase efficiency.
There is very strong resistance at every level to Mr Zhu's edict and its fate will provide a stiff test of his authority. China has made three ambitious attempts at reducing the bureaucracy since it embraced the market two decades ago, but each time the reforms ran aground because, as a state newspaper put it, "after the fervour for reform had died down, governmental institutions became bloated again", and new departments were set up to absorb the laid-off officials. The new premier set a deadline of May 31st for ministries to decide on the cuts they will make and outline new management structures. This has caused a bad-tempered struggle within departments such as the Ministry of Information Industry where Mr Zhu ordered the staff of 1,000 reduced to 400. The Minister of Information Industry, Mr Wu Jichuan, paid two visits to Mr Zhu, pleading with him to increase the complement, first to 600 and then to 500, according to the South China Morning Post, but in the end Mr Zhu said he did not have time to discuss such details and ordered that the 400 figure be adhered to. Infighting over what jobs were to be axed became so intense that senior officials took off in 40 Audis to Tianjin for a weekend of fishing and bridge to ease the tension. For foreigners in China, getting a newspaper is a minor irritant compared to dealing with bureaucrats at a higher level. Last year 437 foreign firms pulled out of the country, according to the official Market newspaper, citing, among other reasons, irrational government policies, bureaucracy and the poor quality of Chinese officials. Foreign companies complained in particular about increasingly complicated approval procedures, many of which require `service' payments to officials.
The bureaucracy has mired another big initiative by the prime minister in red tape - the privatisation of housing. Most Chinese cannot afford to buy apartments or move into new flats as Mr Zhu suggested they do three months ago. An investigation by Shanghai's Jiefang Daily showed that property prices remain too high because of a staggering 120 fees and charges builders have to pay to government departments before they can start work. In Shanghai, developers on average need 118 approvals from different departments, and a single approval can require several visits to different government offices. One developer spent 27 months getting all the necessary bits of paper to build a block of flats. Shanghai abolished 19 types of fees and charges last month but this will make little difference to the number of officials who stamp and glue pieces of paper together. As for the Friendship Store in Beijing, the only explanation for the continued gross overmanning is that the controlling department is only paying lip service to reform and refuses to lay off workers at a time of rising unemployment and social tensions.
It also keeps the carbon paper and glue factories in business, I suppose.