Thread by @Chri5tianGoebel

As someone who has studied government responsiveness in China for almost a decade, I would like to address some of the points made in this thread. 1/n

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1467672536695525380

First of all, are 12345 hotlines, and their online counterpart, mayor's mailboxes, in principle, a good thing? Absolutely! Should we have them in Europe? Definitely! Are they in any way related to democracy? No. 2/n

Chinese citizens do not have a right to a 12345 hotlines. They are also not subject to public accountability. They are an offer the government can rescind at any time. And: consultation does not equal democracy. 3/n

The post states that local governments "have an obligation to treat your case and solve it". This is correct. But do they fulfil this obligation? As with almost everything related to China, the answer is: it depends. 4/n

It depends on what your problem is, where are you are, and who you are. 5/n

1) Issues and responsiveness. Public input to these platforms usually falls into three categories: request for information (咨询), suggestions (建议) and complaints (投诉). 6/n

As a general rule, these platforms work better for questions than complaints. 7/n

Within the complaint category, they work better if an issue is easily resolved, doesn’t need inter-departmental cooperation, and doesn’t cost the government money. Satisfaction rates are higher for complaints against noise than complaints against land expropriation. 8/n

2) Location and responsiveness. Some places take public feedback extremely seriously and go out of their way to produce an acceptable solution, others don't. Complaint/feedback platforms are operated locally, and are subject to cost/benefit calculations by local leaders. 9/n

As one party secretary in a wealthy city once told me when I asked him why their platform lagged behind less developed localities: we have high GDP, they don't. 10/n

3) Individual characteristics and responsiveness. Not everyone is treated equally. If you are a white male European who is fluent in Chinese, people go out of their way to help you. But this experience shouldn’t be treated as being representative for everyone in China. 11/n

For example, Greg Distelhorst and @YueHou7 conducted a field experiment and found that “local officials were 33% less likely to provide assistance to citizens with ethnic Muslim names then to ethnically unmarked peers”. 12/n

So can local officials do what they want? No. These platforms are subject to supervision, usually by the leaders at the same level or that above. But some of these platforms get 1000s of submissions each day, which makes systematic assessment of their responsiveness hard. 13/n

According to our research, the quality of a response is less important than its speed. Officials get rewarded for fast replies, because this can be easily measured. 14/n

External consultants assess the quality of 12345 numbers by how fast they can speak to someone and how polite that person is. Beyond that, measuring quality is tricky, especially if you want to automatise measurement. 15/n

In sum, the very positive experience by the OP is most likely influenced by the nature and underlying issue of his request, the locality where he made it, and his ethnicity. I doubt that a migrant worker from Xinjiang reporting abuse would be afforded the same treatment. 16/16