Documents Circulated with Visible Revision Marks Reflect This Unit's Increasingly Pragmatic Work Style
Last quarter, Li Jinhua, a staff officer at the headquarters of the People's Armed Police Huangnan Detachment, Qinghai Corps, encountered something unusual while submitting a proposal to detachment leadership.
Under the previous procedure, documents drafted by the headquarters had to be reviewed and signed level by level—by section chiefs, department heads, and detachment leaders in sequence. Whenever revisions were made, the relevant pages had to be reprinted to ensure that documents presented to higher-level leaders were "clean and free of any revision marks." This time, the director of the Political Work Office made only a few character changes directly on the two A4 pages bearing the proposal. Li Jinhua was about to reprint the pages as usual before submitting them to the deputy political commissar for review and signature. By coincidence, just as Li Jinhua reached the door of the document printing room, he ran into the deputy political commissar.
The deputy political commissar took the document, looked it over, and pointed to the revised passages: "The director's changes are perfectly legible and do not affect reading or comprehension. There is no need to reprint—I can sign directly." He signed his comments on the document on the spot and added: "A single document passes through the signatures of multiple leaders. If one or two sheets of paper are wasted at each review-and-signature stage, the accumulated cost of all that paper is no small sum."
Even so, Li Jinhua remained somewhat uneasy: in all his years working at the headquarters, he had never seen a document marked up with revision "blotches" submitted directly to the detachment's two principal officers. Would the leaders think he was being insufficiently rigorous or serious in his work?
Noticing Li Jinhua's concern, the deputy political commissar took the document and, as they walked, said: "Leaving these handwritten marks allows the detachment's principal officers to see at a glance the revision process and the full background of the document—it actually contains more information than a document that is clean throughout." With that, he brought Li Jinhua along as he visited in turn the offices of the detachment commander and the political commissar.
Pointing to the revision marks on the document, the detachment commander said: "The changes are perfectly clear to me—there is no need to reprint. Diligent and thrifty army-building (勤俭建军) is not a slogan to be shouted; it must be put into practice in the details of daily work and life, in concrete actions. Moreover, these revision marks are precisely the authentic imprint of each level exercising oversight and fulfilling its responsibilities." The political commissar also endorsed the approach and directed that, going forward, official documents circulated within the headquarters for review and signature could be transmitted with revision marks intact, provided the revisions did not affect readability or archiving. This would both conserve paper and improve the efficiency of the review-and-signature process, while reflecting the party committee headquarters' work style of seeking truth and being pragmatic (求真务实).
The detachment party committee subsequently used this incident as an opportunity to study and refine a number of specific measures for economical and thrifty daily office work at the headquarters, benchmarked against the "Outline for Basic-Level Building in the Military" (《军队基层建设纲要》) and higher-level directives on strictly practicing economy and opposing waste. These measures are as follows: First, normalize "revision-mark review and signature" (痕迹审签). Except for archival originals and classified documents handled in accordance with regulations, documents circulated and submitted for signature within the headquarters need not be reprinted if the leaders' revisions are clearly legible; they are to be transmitted directly through the existing process. Second, achieve full coverage of double-sided printing. All non-classified, non-formal documents at the headquarters are to be printed double-sided as a uniform standard; single-sided non-classified waste paper is to be collected centrally for use as internal draft paper and notepaper. Third, office supplies are to follow the principle of "repair before replace, trade old for new." Gel pens are to be issued with replacement refills, with pen casings reused; durable office supplies such as staplers, file folders, and staple removers are to be repaired first when they malfunction, and new items may only be requisitioned in exchange for the old item once it has been confirmed beyond repair. Fourth, non-classified work records are to prioritize electronic documents in order to reduce paper printing.
After this series of measures was introduced, the work concepts and habits of the detachment's officers and soldiers gradually began to change. Documents with revision marks circulate efficiently, the work style of the party committee headquarters has become more pragmatic, and the ethos of diligent and thrifty army-building and hard struggle (勤俭建军、艰苦奋斗) is steadily being integrated into the officers' and soldiers' daily training and life.