Employees at a local court in Shanghai take an oath on December 1 before the nation's first Constitution Day. Photo: CFP

You would think that having more people would make it easier to get things done. But for Chinese local governments and courts, over-staffing often results in more corruption, more bureaucracy, and less efficiency. Courts and government departments usually have fixed quotas imposed from higher up the system on staffing. Such positions enjoy the privilege of an "iron rice bowl," a permanent job until retirement covered by the government budget. But these quotas are often exceeded. Take the local court in Guangshui, a county-level city of Hubei Province, which had a quota of 146 while it employed 267 people.

No-show jobs



Guangshui is a satellite city of the larger metropolis of Suizhou. Overstaffing in the judicial system has been a long-time problem in the Suizhou courts.

The local authorities allocate money from the public fund to pay the salary. Those who are not included within the staffing quotas, are not authorized by the Hubei Provincial High People's Court nor are they qualified to be involved in trials, but the local government budgets cover their salaries.

Cai Shuiping, director of discipline inspection group of Guangshui since 2000, revealed that most of the excess staff were hired a decade ago. The local court barely recruited new staff afterwards.

Currently, only 80 of the staff in the court are eligible to hold trials. "The unbalanced age structure of the cadre of judges and the lack of reserve forces, have highly increased the stress among the judges," Wang Lun, president of the local court said at a conference in January.

Many courts at county and city levels in other regions are also overstaffed, after nepotism resulted in the relatives and friends of local officials and judges being taken onto the payroll.

"We used to have an unwritten rule that everybody involved in the judicial system got to have one kid on the payroll. Plus, jobs for the daughters and sons of the middle-level officials can also be arranged," an insider who asked not to be named, told Southern Weekly.

He admitted his own daughter used to benefit from the policy and worked in the local court, along with the children of other officials.

For instance, Lu Rui, was arranged to work in the court in 2001, nominally as an "assigned job on graduation," a national policy that was annulled early in the 1990s. Later, it emerged that Lu was the son of a local court leader.

Nepotism also affected promotion. According to the insider, one of the associate chief judges seldom appeared in the office and lacked basic legal knowledge, but was promoted because her father was a local government leader.

Relatives and friends not only occupy the key posts but also some minor positions. "When I was a chief judge in the local court, my driver was a relative of an official in the local people's congress," the insider said.

Despite the long-existing problem, local authorities seldom cleared up the personnel that exceed the staff quotas. "No one wanted to offend the people who had official connections," the insider said.

Unsolved problems



Overstaffing has burdened the local public finance.

"In the grassroots court like Guangshui, the local court had to allocate at least 50,000 yuan ($8,031) per year for a staff salary. Now, there were more than 100 employees over the quota, it would cost an extra 6 million yuan in public funds each year," an anonymous local judge said.

Local courts used to think of different ways to collect money. In some extreme cases, the court charged extra fees from the defendants and the accusers to fill the hole.

On December 3, a judge charged a poor, property-less couple 700 yuan for a divorce hearing, while the fee, according to the law, should range from 50 to 300 yuan. Insiders reported such overcharging on legal fees is rampant.

"It is also a common practice for local courts to charge a legal fee from both the defendants and the plaintiff," a person who used to work in Guangshui court said.

The quality of the legal staff has been deteriorating due to rampant nepotism. Some even practice fraud by collusion with outsiders.

In 2013, the Guangshui court heard a case where one of the lawyers was ordered by a court clerk to act in a traffic dispute case to help the official file a false insurance claim.

Overstaffing has severely influenced the work of the court.

Sometimes, people who are not eligible for the handle of the cases were asked to participate in the trial if the court was short-handed. "But their names cannot be put on the legal documents, while the names of personnel who are eligible for the trial but not involved would be signed instead," an insider said.

While the judges were busy handling cases, the staff who were employed through nepotism had nothing to do. "Some of them went to office and spent the day reading newspapers or play cards to kill time," a local retired judge said.

But even the qualified judges are being questioned about their conduct.

It has been a public secret that some of the new judges give verdicts in cases with the aid of veteran legal workers who never took the national judicial examination but have rich experience of legal rules and regulations.

"When I began to work in the court at the very beginning, I had no idea of the law, and couldn't really handle the case. The legal worker who had rich experience of handling cases taught me and told me how to find the legal grounds to rule and how to interpret the law and I had to listen to him," Feng Chaoyun, former deputy director of Guangshui court, said.

The local government says they have no clear way to solve the problems. "We can only wait till the old judges to retire from the positions and after that, we can have quotas to recruit new ones," Cai Shuiping said.

However, with the retirement of the old generation of the judges, the court may face more stringent problems. There are too many non-professional legal staff in the system, while the experienced judges retired. So we lack judges to handle the cases," Cai said.

"Because of the long-time overstaffing in Guangshui court, local courts have failed to recruit new judges in recent years, which might lower the quality of the judges and have a negative influence on the management of local courts," Chen Tao, a Beijing-based lawyer, told the Global Times.