What China Can Learn from American Taxpayers

Fifty-three-year-old Jane Alice is one of the poor in Bell, Los Angeles, U.S. She has recently been making a living from collecting and recycling garbage. While sorting through the garbage, she found a payroll of Bell’s officials. It read that Mayor Oscar Hernandez’s pay was high as $790,000, which is much higher than President Obama’s salary, and Sheriff Randy Adams’s pay was $460,000, which is $150,000 higher than his Los Angeles peer.

Alice was angry and confused that, while so many in Bell were struggling for a living, the officials took such high payments without any guilt. She took to the street and spoke out. “They are taking more than the U.S. president does, which is obviously too much, and they have betrayed the taxpayers!”*

When the old woman spoke as a taxpayer, we saw an apologetic mayor; he felt ashamed and for the remainder of his term no longer accepted payment. A television station saluted her as the most politically influential recycling woman: “For a country to develop healthily, every citizen must be granted such influence!”* But where does this influence come from? How could it be linked to healthy development for a country? Thinking over those questions is very enlightening for us as we try to understand what it means to be a taxpayer.

The most important supervision is from taxpayers, and civil servants must be responsible to taxpayers. Based on this idea, we see the apology from the mayor and more support from taxpayers. Of course we also see American officials’ respect for the protest by taxpayers.

For the time being in China, civil servants and officials are not used to supervision by taxpayers, like the current “ranting one.” When a citizen claimed, “You are paid by taxpayers, and you must be supervised and held accountable,” the civil servant responded, “How am I paid by taxpayers?” So what did we see from the embarrassing contrast? Make no mistake, some civil servants simply lack the awareness of the existence of taxpayers, let alone that they might be supervised by taxpayers.

The story of the old woman protesting against the mayor’s high payments taught us a lesson: We should advocate taxpayers’ rights and at the same time, considering China’s situation, change the phenomenon of disparity between rights and obligations between taxpayers and the government. As the government collects taxes, it must provide services to taxpayers. If taxpayers don’t have any say in what the taxes are spent on, or even when the taxes are squandered, then they won’t be aware of their status as taxpayers. Citizens are obliged to pay taxes and have the rights to supervise the government’s expenditures; the government has the right to collect taxes and is obliged to provide services to and be supervised by taxpayers. In a modern society the foremost point of taxpayers’ rights is to contain the government’s power and protect taxpayers’ own interests.

*Editor’s note: These quotes, while accurately translated, could not be verified.