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Sanmenxia Party committee to build livelihood issues account book

A giant survey has been launched in the city of Sanmenxia, Central China’s Henan province from this April. The city’s Party cadres at county and township level began to pay door-to-door visits to more than 440,000 rural households in the municipality’s 1,363 administrative villages and rural communities. They are seeking to learn about the problems and difficulties faced by every family and then put together an account of the livelihood issues, People’s Daily reported on April 22.

Prior to these household visits, the cadres undertook a great deal of training. Only when they have mastered rural related policies, can they conduct effective communications with their interviewees to figure out their urgent needs.

Accordingly, an instruction book was specially compiled, in which policies involving administrative affairs, health, poverty alleviation and education were included in a simple and clearly laid out way, as well as those policies’ objectives, working procedures and subsidy standards, together with the corresponding units’ contact details.

In order to standardize a sample for the livelihood account book as well as a pilot for the project, the municipality started the door-to-door survey in Genjia village, a provincial poor village located in the city’s remote Lushi county.

The survey team visited 301 households in the village, and compiled 157 problems from 146 surveyed. They were categorized into the livelihood account book together with their corresponding responsibilities and time limits for the problems’ settlement; moreover, they were then announced to the public.

This survey is different from previous ones, in terms of scope and depth.

Every household, no matter how rich or poor, will be visited by these Party cadres, where they will try to collect information about it, be it important or trivial, including basic information, their difficulties asking for help and advice and suggestions to the Party and government. After that, the staff will sort out these issues and settle them accordingly with specific responsibility systems at village, township, county and municipal levels. Each of the issues can be written-off only after it has been resolved and assessed.

In this way, similar problems in the city were collected and combined, to create a kind of “big data”.

To prevent the account book and its follow-up efforts becoming just a paper exercise, supervision groups will secretly carry out call-back visits at random, and both electronic and hard copies of the account book will be open to public supervision in the village. Additionally the authorities at higher level, such as municipal, county and township, can check the e-version of the account book at any time.

A long-term mechanism to obtain people’s needs in a timely manner will be built later, as well as a dynamic administration system to handle these livelihood account books.

The survey has been a rather strenuous and time-consuming project; but, only through doing it can we gain real results and build service-oriented Party organizations in a more concrete way, explained Yang Shuping, secretary of Sanmenxia’s municipal Party committee.

Edited by Liu Yufen and Brian Salter