Reduce red tape to free sleeping maintenance fund

On June 14, an old building collapsed in Zunyi, Southwest China's Guizhou province, leaving four residents dead and three injured. It was the third building collapse in Guizhou in one month. And only after these tragic incidents did residents realize that lack of maintenance had become a common problem for buildings, especially the relatively old ones.

Ironically, property owners, or at least people who have bought houses, have been paying a certain amount as "public maintenance fund" since 1998. According to incomplete data from China Property Management Association, the fund now totals more than 500 billion yuan ($80.5 billion). Yet only a very small percentage of the amount has been used for maintenance of buildings.

In Wuhua district of Kunming in Southwest China's Yunnan province, for example, less than 2 percent of the total 430 million yuan has been spent on maintenance from 1998 to 2014 while most of the money has been "sleeping" in public accounts. The situation is similar across the country.