South China's Guangdong Province is making serious efforts at downsizing the large number of counties to build a lean and efficient government.

The target, to be met by merging small-size counties or absorbing some of them into urban areas, would reduce the burden on farmers in the form of fees and taxes.

Too many counties have a huge local government structure and a large number of officials, particularly in poor and backward areas of the province.

People jokingly call the structure "a small society under the control of a large government."

Reducing the size of rural governmental organizations and the number of county government officials would help relieve the pressure on local finances as well.

According to official statistics, before the reduction exercise began in 2001, there were 1,588 counties in the province, with an average population of 38,000 in each.

Nearly half of these counties, or 754, had a population of less than 30,000 each, while another 153 had less than 10,000 each.

The Guangdong Civil Affairs Department had asked for a 15 percent cut in counties by the end of last year, a target that has been achieved.

"We fulfilled the quota last year with a rate of 16.6 percent. That means one county in every six was removed," a department official told China Daily Wednesday.

Shenzhen and Guangzhou are planning to go even further in this direction - they want to absorb all counties with complete urbanization in the near future.

But the task is not being fully implemented in some parts of the province, especially in the poor or backward counties in the western and eastern areas.

"Resistance mainly comes from county-level governments," said a Civil Affairs Department official, who did not want to be named.

County leaders there are reluctant to implement the reform, complaining that as soon as their counties are removed, a large number of redundant officials would lose jobs; and that they have no way of dealing with unemployed officials or the debt left by the abolished county government.

Meanwhile, the Guangdong Personnel Department is reducing the size of staff in government departments in the counties to support the task of removing and merging counties.

It has told each city in the province to reduce 20 percent of staff in county governments.

The redundant personnel would mainly be the older officials; they should either be persuaded to leave several years ahead of the legal retirement age; or provided with help in finding new jobs.

For those who are too young to retire, work should be arranged in state-owned institutions.

However, Huang Huahua, the governor of Guangdong Province, said on Tuesday at a government conference that ensuring social stability should be given priority, too.

The reform of municipal and county government organizations cannot be gauged by the reduced number of counties and redundant personnel, but by their working efficiency, he said.

(China Daily March 4, 2004)