An outline of the 12th Five Year Plan addresses mass incidents and social management, and indicates a harder conservative tone in years to come. See Asia Times’ coverage of the Five Year Plan, or ‘Blueprint’:
The Blueprint disclosed for the first time the CCP leadership’s elaborate plans to build a nationwide “yingji xitong [rapid-response system] for tackling emergency incidents”. This was an apparent reaction to the estimated 100,000-odd mass incidents – including riots and disturbances – that had struck the country annually since the late 2000s. While the document did not mention “color revolutions”, the CCP leadership has both before and after the NPC played up its resolve to prevent “hostile anti-Chinese forces” from fomenting disorder in the country.
The Blueprint pointed out that the planned yingji xitong “must be under a comprehensive, unified command, rationally structured, capable of nimble reactions – and that it must have guaranteed capability and high-efficiency operations”. The “backbone” of this mechanism would consist of the police, People’s Armed Police (PAP) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers.
The latter would be supplemented by public security experts and professionals, full-time and part-time staff in security-related enterprises; as well as volunteers. While no deadline has been mentioned, this labyrinthine wei-wen (“upholding stability”) apparatus, which is under the overall supervision of the CCP’s Central Commission for Political and Legal Affairs (CCPLA), is expected to be put together by 2015.
It is apparently due to the huge costs involved that the wei-wen budget for 2011 was set at 624.4 billion yuan (US$95.18 billion), which was 23.3 billion yuan ($3.55 billion) more than that of the PLA.
The Economic Observer covers some of the new standards for evaluating local officials:
The latest Five-year Plan, includes 24 criteria on which local officials are to be judged, these critera are seperated into 12 binding targets and 12 anticipated goals.
Six new criteria for evaluating officials have been added since the 11th Five-year Plan, including two prospective targets: raising average patents of inventions per capita and increasing the average life span by one year.
There are also binding targets which include a mandatory education completion ratio of 93 percent, that non-fossil fuel sourced energy account for 11.4 percent of primary energy consumption, that carbon emission of per unit of GDP drops 17 percent and that 36 million units of policy-based houses will be constructed.
An unnamed official with the NDRC said that the ranking of local officials over the coming 5 years will involve three levels of evaluation. Firstly, related departments will evaluate the performance of officials according to the published criteria in order to determine their suitability for promotion. Second, foreign institutions will be invited to to evaluate local officials’ performance according to the criteria. Thirdly, the National People’s Congress will also conduct a final evaluation on the government as a whole.
