"Bureaucratic overreach" — Phrase of the Week
New drinking bans go too far
Our phrase of the week is: "bureaucratic overreach" (层层加码 céng céng jiā mǎ)
Context
A wave of alcohol bans for government officials has swept across parts of China over the past two months.
These new restrictions build on the far-reaching Eight-point Regulations (八项规定), introduced in December 2012 to improve Party conduct and stamp out corruption.
The trigger for the latest crackdown was an incident during Qingming Festival in April, when the head of a state-owned enterprise in a small city in Hubei province hosted a private dinner with local officials and a visiting deputy district chief. After heavy drinking, one official died from drinking too much alcohol. In an attempt to cover it up, the organisers falsified the guest list to omit the dead man from government records.
Their actions were publicly condemned by both the media and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), China’s top anti-corruption body. Soon after, provinces began rolling out much stricter alcohol bans.
In some cases the new rules prohibit all alcohol consumption on working days (whereas the original Eight-point Regulations only banned it during lunch meetings). Even drinking at private family gatherings on weekends now requires formal approval.
Many within the system worry the rules are going too far:
There’s only one way to describe the alcohol bans issued across different regions: bureaucratic overreach.
从各地禁酒令规定的内容来看，我们只能用4个字来形容：层层加码
cóng gèdì jìnjiǔlìng guīdìng de nèiróng lái kàn, wǒmen zhǐ néng yòng sì ge zì lái xíngróng: céng céng jiā mǎ.
And with that, we have our Sinica Phrase of the Week.
What it means
"Bureaucratic overreach" (层层加码 céng céng jiā mǎ) is a common four-character phrase in Chinese that literally means “adding more weight at each level.”
It refers to situations where each level of bureaucracy imposes additional rules or stricter requirements during policy implementation.
The phrase originates from Peng Dehuai’s Memoirs (彭德怀自述), an autobiographical account by Marshal Peng Dehuai (彭德怀), one of the founding generals of the People’s Republic of China and a key military leader in the Korean War.
Peng began drafting the memoir in the 1960s after falling out of political favor, but it remained unfinished and was published posthumously in the 1980s. The work offers rare insight into his personal reflections and key moments in early PRC history.
The phrase appears in this excerpt:
“In some cases, each level of officials raised the expectations, turning goals that would normally take several years—or more than a decade—to achieve, into targets that had to be met within a year or even just a few months.”
有些指标逐级提高，层层加码，把本来需要几年或者十几年才能达到的要求，变成一年或者几个月就要做到的指标。
yǒuxiē zhǐbiāo zhújí tígāo, céngcéng jiāmǎ, bǎ běnlái xūyào jǐ nián huòzhě shí jǐ nián cáinéng dádào de yāoqiú, biànchéng yì nián huòzhě jǐ ge yuè jiù yào zuòdào de zhǐbiāo.”
Here, Peng describes how policies at the time became increasingly complex, with each level “adding weight” (加码), best described in English as “bureaucratic overreach.”
Today, the phrase is commonly used to describe overly complicated or excessive regulations in China. It gained particular traction during the pandemic, as digital tools like health codes (健康码) and travel codes (行程码) made even basic activities frustratingly difficult.
In the context of the recent wave of alcohol bans for Chinese officials, the same concern applies. While the crackdown is welcomed by many, some worry the new rules are overreaching, even requiring officials to go through a lengthy approval process to simply drink at private family gatherings on weekends.
Andrew Methven is the author of RealTime Mandarin, a resource which helps you bridge the gap to real-world fluency in Mandarin, stay informed about China, and communicate with confidence—all through weekly immersion in real news. Subscribe for free here.
Read more about how this story is being discussed in the Chinese media in this week’s RealTime Mandarin.
