communication issues, part 3 (of 3)

Here’s an example of someone actually trying to collect some information within the department—I am not going to follow the document here, but just look at a person who is herself trying to follow some documents. Aside from the external experts and scholars called upon to comment on every major department initiative, every year the department (like all city government departments) holds a couple of meetings with some outside consultants who comment on the department’s general plans and direction, using specific plans as foci. These are usually organized by individual sections (ke) and divisions (chu—bigger than a section). Recently, the Yankao Hui, the ‘research and testing committee,’ a kind of oversight body for the entire city government, asked that every department compile and submit every set of notes from every one of these meetings since 1998, when Ma Yingjeou took office as mayor.

Nobody has been able to tell me why they want this information. The general sense I’ve been given is that, on the innocent technocratic side, they want to get a sense of the overall attitude of experts and scholars toward the city government’s operations, and also to see what kinds of expert advice tends to get implemented and to what extent. On the realistic side, this is probably another part of the preparation for the 2008 presidential race, in which Ma Yingjeou’s performance as mayor of Taipei will surely play a central role. (The assumption that he will run for president in the next election is so universal that people only refer to it, never stating it outright.)

The person to whom it has fallen to take on this odious task is the former head of my section, a no-nonsense woman who was generally described by the people who worked for her as being fair, competent, and “having shoulders” before she was demoted to her present position as I’m not sure quite what, something like a very senior administrative assistant in the department’s central office. I’m not going to go on a big feminist whine here, but it has come to my notice that her being demoted has left exactly two women in senior positions in the sections of the department actually concerned with urban planning (the head of the administrative/secretarial section and the head of the accounting section are also both women). “To have shoulders” means to protect your subordinates and take responsibility for them: if a person in the lowest, dealing-with-it, position does something they are supposed to do, but which incites somebody’s ire, a boss who has shoulders will stand up for them and maintain the correctness of their actions despite the fact that someone else may disapprove. This is opposed, for instance, to a boss who has a lot of beautiful, inspiring phrases but picks favorites and doesn’t really apply himself to his job or take care of his subordinates. It is also opposed to a boss who is overly fond of zuoren, which can be translated as doing-person, or doing-humanity, which might less weirdly be rendered by the phrase ‘being a good person.’

In common parlance, zuoren is a good thing—in fact it’s kind of the good thing. It means acting correctly toward other people and maintaining your relationships properly, behaving in a way that befits the balance of assistance and obligation in a given situation, giving gratitude where gratitude is due and giving aid where aid is called for. In a bizarre twist of phrase, zuoren seems to be an exclusively negative term when used by my government bureaucrats. A boss who likes to zuoren too much utterly lacks shoulders: he may have initiated some great plan, but when confronted with opposition from other interested parties, he buckles, leaving his subordinates in the lurch. Sometimes zuoren shades into intimations of outright corruption, but it always implies some sort of undue influence—the point is less what kind of influence (higher-ups, elected representatives, private parties) or how it is manifested (threats, money, sentiment), and more that the boss himself is too weak, either in ethics or in character, to withstand it.

I asked the former section head (to whom everyone refers as Family Name Former Section Head—leaving me uncertain how to address her) about the data collection and submission process. In response she held up the case file, which happened to be on her desk, gave a wan smile, and half-rolled her eyes. Actually, after every one of these meetings the department sends a copy of the meeting notes to the Yankao Hui anyway; so presumably they have them somewhere. Why don’t they compile them themselves then? Because it’s just as difficult and time-consuming for them to find the information as for us, and since they are in a higher position than we are, they can just tell us to do it ourselves. In our department, these meetings are organized by particular people in particular sections; the responsibility changes hands from year to year. After receiving the request from the Yankao Hui, Former Section Head turned to the head of each section asking for all their information. So far (two weeks after the request) she has received exactly two meeting summaries for the period covering the last six years. There are at least ten more out there, but where would they be?

The meeting notes are usually the responsibility of whoever organizes the meeting—the chengban ren, dealing-with-it person. What with the recent reorganization of the department (in which Former Section Head was demoted for no reason that anyone has pointed to) and its generally high attrition rate, you now have this situation where a lot of the people who dealt-with-it at the time have left, or been moved, or they have cleared out their desks and thrown things away. She asked people in the various sections, but “nobody’s willing to admit having had anything to do with it, it’s like, ‘it’s too long ago,’ ‘I forgot’ and so on.” What about our archives? All this information is definitely in the archives. The problem is finding it. The consultants’ consultations will not be filed under its own category, they will be listed under the particular projects that these people were called in to comment on. So she'd have to go through the bound books that list the documents in the archives, one by one, and figure out which cases had relevant meeting notes.

Former Section Head could go and look through the bound books herself because she has a high enough position in the department and it would be for a department project. But then to actually access those files, she’d still have to fill out a carbon-copy request form for every individual one and then have it stamped by the section head of each relevant section. So it’s not that it’s technically impossible to find all this information; it’s just that it would take a very, very long time and be a big, big bother. Geez, so how are you going to handle this? Won’t it just eat up all your working hours? “I’ll give them what I can get from the individual sections, and let them deal with it themselves.”

In general the archives tend to appear in conversation as a kind of documentation gulag. “Yes yes, the Department of Social Work did an extensive study on that last year," a high-level official told me when I asked about a particular policy. "I think we still have one lying around, I’d be happy to lend it to you. Unless it’s been put in the archives already. Hmm, let’s see, the people in the community services office might still have one, you should check with them right away. Go right now and ask. Let’s just hope it hasn’t been put in the archives already and we can find a copy to lend you. Otherwise you could go to the Department of Social Work and see if they have one that hasn’t gone to the archives yet.”

What’s weird about all this to me is less the fact of dispersed and uncollatable information—that by itself seems pretty normal. But to have this basically pre-computerized approach coexisting with this incredibly high-tech quality of the rest of life here—and the rest of the city government itself—is causing me a little cognitive dissonance.