The State Council has announced its intention to close the representative offices of county-level governments in Beijing, according to an opinion made public on Xinhua on January 29.
Provincial government representative offices are unaffected. Established representative offices of prefectural/municipal level governments can remain with the approval of their superiors in the provincial government. As other media reports have noted (1, 2), representative offices of local Chinese governments have been implicated in a spate of recent corruption scandals. According to a January 24 Outlook Weekly report, central authorities have ordered the closures to take place within six months, potentially implicating thousands of representative offices.