Politburo member and Xi Jinping’s chief-of-staff Ding Xuexiang chaired a meeting of the Party's special working mechanism for rectifying formalism and alleviating burdens on the grassroots on August 20,

Xinhua reported that “While highlighting the problem of unnecessary and repetitive meetings, paperwork and performance evaluations, the meeting asked localities to guard against and rectify newly-emerged practices of formalities for formalities sake.” The effort is to reduce administrative tasks and the number of inspections. It also stated that “The competent authorities will mete out severe punishments to those causing serious consequences due to their superficial measures on pandemic response or production safety.”