Conflating Red Tape with Administrative Burdens: Evaluating the Academic-practitioner Gap in China

While red tape refers to burdensome and ineffective rules and procedures in an organization, an administrative burden is a concept that can be easily conflated with red tape—it is defined as a function of learning and psychological and compliance costs that citizens experience in their interactions with government. Red tape and administrative burdens are not only important research topics in public administration but also are salient issues for government and citizens. While scholars have reached a consensus on their respective definitions, limited research has been conducted on how China's public workers use both terms in their practices. In fact, “red tape” and “administrative burdens” were already being used in state rules, regulations, and documents well before Chinese scholars introduced the terms into Chinese academia. In light of such a phenomenon, this paper examines how the two terms are adopted and used by the Chinese state in official documents. Through a systematic search of China's central-level and provincial-level government rules and regulations, we find that there are 293 documents that incorporate the phrase “red tape” and 70 documents that cite “administrative burdens”. However, a closer examination reveals a significant “referential difference” between scholarly definitions of the two terms and their applications in state documents. Further analysis shows that even these state documents face a “situation of ambiguity” when applying the definition of each term. There is a lack of consistency and coherence in official understandings of what red tape and administrative burdens stand for and how they should be used—policy documents at different levels and in various regions define red tape in 19 ways, and they define administrative burdens in as many as 12 ways, and many of these definitions are overlapping. For instance, government documents use red tape and administrative burdens interchangeably to describe burdensome government policies. Such ambiguity may undercut the empirical relevance of academic findings on red tape and administrative burdens, thereby making it even more difficult for scholars and practitioners to find the “silver bullet” to tackle such bureaucratic ills. Based on our analysis, we call for an academic research agenda to further diagnose the antecedents and consequences of the academia-practitioner divide as well as to produce recipes to bridge this divide.