"Labor is cheap and so labor is wasted"

This post about encountering Chinese bureaucracy, on Andres Gentry's blog, eloquently describes the situation in a country that clearly gives Russia a run for its money in terms of frustration-inducing inefficiency. Unannounced and illogical rules, elaborate line-standing and queueing arrangements, seemingly unnecessary procedural steps - they have all of this in China, too, it appears. Gentry encountered Chinese bureaucracy to rival the most inefficient Russia has to offer while trying to register for a Chinese-language proficiency exam:

[...] From start to finish the process took five minutes. So, to recap, we waited four and a half hours for a registration which took five minutes to complete. In addition, seven (seven!) people were necessary to do those five minutes of work.

The inefficiency of the process, the lack of publicity and confusion surrounding both the dates for registration and the method of registration, and the fact that in spite of facing the same problems every day of the registration period nothing was improved, well, I just marvel at the managerial incompetence.

[...] like too many things in China, the process was intentionally set up to be difficult, cumbersome, and to waste as much time of as many people as possible.

While I veered between laughter and anger yesterday at the nonsense of having to wait four and a half hours even though we arrived well within the appointed time, and it's difficult to decide how to react when you know that the bulk of your time waiting is taken up by office workers on an extended lunch break, ultimately I think it just makes me a bit sad that the worth of everyone involved, both the office workers who were wasting their own time doing tasks of such mind-numbing simple-mindedness and the students who must waste hours of their day waiting to finish a five-minute process, was so unvalued.

Yesterday's experience in inefficiency was, I believe, hardly unique. Most everyone who has lived in China for a long period of time can come up with countless others: trying to get certificates for your business from myriad government offices that do nearly nothing, the multitudes of shop assistants in nearly every department store who do the work that far fewer could, the armies of people vainly trying to clean dust off the streets, the farm fields divided into ridiculously small plots that simply scream inefficieny. Labor is cheap and so labor is wasted. Labor consists of humans though and wasting humans is a depressing commentary on the value of being a human in China.

That's the thing really: if you make work inefficient then the clear implication is that you don't want to fully use the human talent at your disposal. You are content wasting your workers' time and skills doing things [...] far below what they are capable.

People often wonder why Russia, with its highly educated population, and many people who seem quite capable of solving complex problems in a one-on-one conversation, is not able to produce more wealth more efficiently (not counting wealth-producing, non-renewable things that come out of the ground). The description above provides, I think, some insight into the reasons behind this paradox.