Anonymous netizen:
I’ve been holding this in for a long time, and I really need to vent.
Local finances have been tight for the past two years. There’s a lot of complaining on Zhihu about those in the system having their salaries cut and being asked to pay back performance bonuses from previous years, and they feel sorry for themselves.
I can only sneer: What’s that to you? In my eastern city of Da xx, they’re directly raiding people’s homes, okay?
This happened in mid-2022. The city, including various county and district x committees, took unified action, dispatching working groups to major units to strictly investigate the issue of public officials engaging in illegal part-time jobs.
Those unlucky ones who were investigated had no connections. At first, they thought the x committee was just trying to boost their performance, and after being interviewed, they were quite cooperative and planned to pay the fines.
But the fines issued by the x committee were shocking. I won’t even mention the city level; at the county level, the fines were 600,000-700,000 yuan, and for some, it was 1 million yuan, no negotiation! They had to go to the bank to transfer the money to the local government’s public account, and then take the transfer receipt to the x committee to close the case.
Then these unlucky ones realized that they were being treated like pigs being slaughtered. In major units, there were 5-6 people affected, and in others, there were over a dozen. There were rumors that the city confiscated 2.5 billion yuan in one go.
Even those who have worked for thirty years said they had never seen anything like it.
I’ll add some details.
1. Why are there so many people in the local system with part-time jobs?
The salary levels are low. In 2012, a county-level public institution employee only earned 2,000-3,000 yuan a month, with no year-end bonus. In the past ten years, it has increased a lot. A county-level public institution employee now earns only 4,000+ yuan a month, and besides the rice, noodles, and oil at the end of the year, there are no other benefits or year-end bonuses; county-level civil servants earn only 5,000+ yuan a month, with a year-end bonus of 10,000-20,000 yuan. The house prices in the county are 7,000-8,000 yuan, so how can they afford to buy a house with a fixed salary?
2. Those investigated this time were basically older people in public institutions who understood the business and had technical skills.
The salaries of public institution employees are really too low, not enough to support a family, so most of them would sell their technical skills to earn money in their spare time: those who could draw would draw for others, accountants would do bookkeeping for others, and those who could do cost accounting would do budgeting. The leaders above were also well aware of this and turned a blind eye; these older people below didn’t hide it much either, and since the area wasn’t big, they had been doing it for so long that they basically had leads, so for the x committee: it was easy to investigate.
And these older people who have business skills but haven’t gotten a high position, and still have to work hard to sell their labor to earn money, have no background and are easy to manipulate.
3. Why are the fines so high?
The x committee traced back 20 years of bank card transactions and electronic transaction records (this is why they targeted the older people), and some even checked your wife’s and children’s records, making you explain all income outside of your salary (they don’t look for evidence, they just make you explain).
Then, based on your family’s financial situation, they roughly estimated a number.
Finally, let me talk about the results. Because they were originally after the money, and these older people who were punished were actually the backbone and technical experts of various units, and engaging in illegal part-time jobs is not corruption, so no one was dismissed/demoted (you still need them to work), and no one was transferred to criminal proceedings.
This action was very strong, and the leaders didn’t want to get involved in this kind of thing at first.
But the old comrades who earned money by selling their labor, many of them have very poor family conditions, and unless they sell their houses, they definitely can’t come up with the fines.
Some old comrades went everywhere begging for help, even taking out the money for the coffins of their 70-80 year old parents, but they still couldn’t raise the money within the required three days; finally, they had to go to the unit and kneel down to the head of their unit: Please help me ask the comrades of the working group to show some leniency and give us some more time.
The head of the unit finally couldn’t help but go and talk to the working group: These comrades haven’t committed corruption or heinous crimes, are you trying to force people to death?
Many people don’t believe it, so I’ll add some details:
Why is this happening? Because the local financial pressure is beyond your imagination.
Take a certain county under the city as an example, with a GDP of 100 billion+, and the city investment debt accounts for about 40% of the GDP. But city investment is a recent thing, and the local government has been borrowing on a large scale before that. Schools, hospitals, and major units and their subordinate units, which one hasn’t borrowed money? An accountant in the local bureau told me that the county’s debt scale is at least 200% of the GDP, and city investment debt can only be considered the last straw.
The county is out of money, and the countryside is even worse. A certain town wants to start an engineering project, but the town has no money and still forces it to start, and in the end, it unintentionally became a free ride—the construction team paid the advance but couldn’t get the money, so they had to withdraw, and then they found another construction team to continue the cycle; they couldn’t find one locally, so they went to Guizhou and Yunnan to trick outsiders to do it. In the end, the project went through 8 construction teams, with an average of 3 million yuan in advance payment per team, and the most advanced team paid 10 million yuan, and finally 6 construction teams collectively went to the county to petition.
I don’t want to cause trouble for myself, so I can only say that what I said is true, and I’ll delete the post at most tonight. Please, the first-ranked brother in the comment section, come out and say if what I said is true @无奈的背单词.
不想给自己惹麻烦，我只能说自己说的是真的，最多今晚删帖。麻烦评论区排名第一的老兄出来说下@无奈的背单词 ，我说的是不是事实。
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