Li Chaoxing, director of the Tianjin Municipal Commission of Industry and Information Technology, was recently dismissed from his post because of his failure to fulfill his duties.

According to a notice issued by the Tianjin authorities, in August 2013, the commission signed a framework cooperation agreement with a government department to jointly build a data center in Tianjin. However, it failed to come up with any cooperation content in the following three years, resulting in the agreement's lack of substantial progress. Li, as head of the commission, always held a passive attitude toward the project and thus was held accountable for not pushing it forward, according to the notice.

As the senior official in charge of the commission's work, Li deserves his punishment and this is by no means unfair treatment.

It is indeed a pity that the data center has been delayed by the commission with "one excuse after another".

At a seminar organized in January 2016 for provincial- and ministerial-level officials to study the spirit of the Fifth Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping lashed out at the inertia of officials. Since then Party and government organs at various levels have worked out measures to punish officials who fail to fulfill their duties.

Quite a few officials have received punishments for their "inaction" in recent years, but the punishment of an official of Li's rank is not common, and it shows the determination of the authorities to tackle the widely-denounced lack of action by some officials.

Such a passive attitude toward their work compromises the services they should offer the public, increases the costs of social transactions and weakens society's pursuit of higher efficiency.

Li's dismissal signals that no officials will be exempt from being held accountable for their inaction.