China "super-ministry" plan faces super challenges

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING, March 11 (Reuters) - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Tuesday unveils a bureaucratic redesign that he hopes will foster greener, more efficient government by creating new "super ministries".

Yet with fierce rival interests at stake, experts said the plan was unlikely to end turf wars over energy policy, pollution and industry giants.

The reforms will herd together dozens of agencies, creating big departments for industry, transport and the environment, according to officials and local press reports that have dubbed them "super ministries".

The plan is a high point of this year's National People's Congress, the Communist Party-controlled parliament that meets in full once a year. National leaders have said it will make for better government, cutting red-tape and clarifying officials' responsibilities as they steer the increasingly complex economy.

A stronger environmental administration could cut pollution that has stoked rising public discontent and the revamp is also likely to include a new energy commission that could bolster Beijing's grip on the crucial, but fragmented, sector.

But this is far from China's first big bureaucratic revamp, and past results have been less than super.

One recent study counted eight overhauls since 1949, with the last under Wen's predecessor, Zhu Rongji, in 1998 and 2003, who also vowed to dramatically streamline government.

Wen's plan would cut some inefficiency and overlap but not dramatically transform the country's top-down, Party-dominated approach to governing, said Ding Xueliang, a Beijing-based scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.