Central directives are met with local workarounds, so the gap between a policy and its implementation is expected rather than exceptional.
A standing complaint in Chinese governance, in circulation well before it was studied: a directive issued at the centre meets a counter-measure in the province, and reported compliance is produced without the underlying change. It states the mechanism Goodhart and Campbell describe, arrived at independently and transmitted as folk wisdom rather than as a finding.
In practice
- A ministry caps overtime; departments reclassify the hours as training and the cap is met on paper.
- A school told to cut class sizes creates a register class of forty that never meets, and teaches in the same rooms as before.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is information asymmetry: the centre sets targets it cannot verify locally, and local officials are judged on reported compliance, so producing the report is cheaper than producing the outcome.
- In its favour
- It names a pattern documented across large administrative systems, and it connects directly to Goodhart's law and to campaign-style governance in China.
- Against it
- The origin and date of the idiom are not established, it is documented in current usage rather than traced to a source, and how far implementation gaps exceed those in other large states has not been measured.
- Standing
- The origin and date of the idiom are not established; it is documented in current usage rather than traced to a source.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life