Crossing the Boundary / 越界

Author: Dexin Kong
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3831-5725
Structured and refined with assistance from ChatGPT
AI Automatic Translation (Unreviewed)

Event

In 2024, the author’s company was entrusted with a project to assist a local government in investigating whether there were problems in how grassroots departments provided services to businesses.

There was a young researcher in the project team who had just joined the company. It was his first time participating in this kind of project, so he took the work very seriously.

During one field visit, he discovered that a public self-service terminal was no longer functioning because it had not been maintained for a long time.

After returning, he included the issue in the investigation records.

But after reporting it, the response he received was:

“This is outside the scope of the current project.”

He was even criticized for being “unprofessional.”

The young researcher was deeply affected by this and became quite discouraged.

Later, the project lead spoke with him privately.

“This is not about whether the issue should be handled,” the project lead told him. “It’s about the fact that it is not your place to handle it.”

“We often say that power must be kept inside a cage. That phrase is not just empty rhetoric. In government work, a strong sense of boundaries is extremely important.”

“If everyone were allowed to arbitrarily expand the scope of their work, and then expand the scope of interpretation along with it, government authority would eventually spiral out of control.”

The project lead paused for a moment, then said meaningfully:

“So, you crossed the boundary.”

Note:
This project is an ongoing independent research effort developed in spare time.
Some concepts and observations may continue to evolve over time.
English translations are provided primarily for accessibility and cross-cultural communication.
Certain expressions may not fully capture the nuances of the original Chinese text.
The Chinese version remains the primary semantic reference.