AS EARLY AS MARCH 2015, the State Council, China's Cabinet, canceled 67 vocational certificates and approvals. However, the bureau of housing and urban-rural development in Haikou, South China's Hainan province, recently issued an official document requiring all local interior decorators to have two of the canceled certificates. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

Does the local government of Haikou know they are acting against the executive order of the central government?

There are various laws regulating the market, and all the local authorities need to do is to enforce them so that those breaking the laws get their deserved punishments. There is no need for the local government to intervene with their own measures.

Worse, some journalists visited Haikou and found that it is very easy to obtain the required vocational certificates by paying a certain agency a "training fee".

Further, the local "trade association" is also called the Haikou office for regulating the interior decoration industry. In other words, it is likely the "trade association" is the white glove of some local bureaucrats holding their hands out for illicit gains.

If this is the case there is an interest chain behind the officials of Haikou insisting workers obtain the abolished certificates. Just as Premier Li Keqiang once said, some local training agencies provided mandatory "services" to residents and enterprises and made profits in the process. That seriously curbed the market from becoming prosperous.

Such a phenomenon used to exist everywhere, and that's partly why the central leadership has vowed to push forward reform by simplifying administrative procedures. With the reform going on, the problem has been solved in many regions, but it proves deeply rooted in Haikou.

We hope the higher authorities can intervene by probing the situation in Haikou. They are acting not only against the executive order of the central government, but also against the law. It is also time to investigate and see whether the phenomenon exists in other regions, too, so that the reform can proceed smoothly.