1A system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.

1. 1.1 A state or organization governed or managed as a bureaucracy.
   官僚机构，官僚国家
   Example sentencesExamples

   • By 1991 the Soviet Union, and the Stalinist bureaucracy which headed it, had collapsed.
   • Some were continued, largely because there were so many elements within the Baath Party bureaucracy with a vested interest in these expenditures.
   • Benn believed the Soviet system remained a positive force long after the workers' state of 1917 was replaced with the Stalinist bureaucracy.
   • He distrusts private initiative and longs for giant bureaucracies to run people's lives for them.
   • The Stalinist bureaucracy has proven to be - as Trotsky predicted - the gravedigger of the October Revolution.
   • Its first act has been to draft a new democratic constitution which will outlaw oppression of the former communist bureaucracy.
   • He and six other members of the eight-man Soviet delegation, including Bukharin who led it, died at the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
   • Just one decade later the policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy represented the opposite.
   • The Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing, which was based on the seizure of power by peasant-based armies, was never socialist or communist.
   • On top of this, the Stalinist bureaucracy was gaining a stranglehold on the revolution.
   • This is one of the big problems with bureaucracies, especially as regards long-seated civil organizations.
   • The post-Soviet bureaucracies thrive on registration, licensing and other enforced paperwork.
   • Does anyone really believe that the majority of working people actually like Government bureaucracies?
   • Virtually all corporations and government bureaucracies are dictatorships.
   • Such automatic feedback mechanisms are one of the primary reasons why markets perform so much better than public sector bureaucracies.
   • Certainly, massive health bureaucracies and well endowed research institutions do not have a monopoly on wisdom.
   • In brushing aside the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the claim is made that the market economy in China will inevitably bring democracy.
   • However, even his own federal bureaucracy eliminated 40,000 jobs this year.
   • Most bureaucracies encourage their people to be the first and only line of defense.
   • Three critical experiences of BC workers exemplify the role of the union bureaucracy and the NDP.
2. 1.2 The officials in a bureaucracy, considered as a group or hierarchy.
   官僚阶层
   Example sentencesExamples

   • Conservative MPs, the constituency associations, and the party bureaucracy at Central Office are now united in a single organization.
   • The federal bureaucracy, where millions of workers don't agree with the president, has been weak.
   • In America, large firms and the state have to employ bureaucracies to cope with and satisfy one another.
   • The medieval period was one of political fragmentation even as the state administrative bureaucracy grew.
   • There are, of course, a chief executive's policies, which are executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies.
   • The German bureaucracy worked loyally; its Soviet counterpart often worked more for itself than for its rulers.
   • It took a lot of courage to write in a police state that ‘the ruling bureaucracy is anti working class, an enemy’, and call for its revolutionary overthrow.
   • He created a multi-layered bureaucracy between him and the people who worked on the trains, as well as the traveling public.
   • The same can be said about Attac's relations with the trade union bureaucracy, another important prop of the old social order.
   • He often seemed to regard the Washington bureaucracy rather than the Vietnamese communists as his main enemy.
   • Did the foreign policy bureaucracy facilitate or impede presidential decisions for war?
   • The labour bureaucracies could no longer combine their defence of the profit system with the advocacy of limited social reforms.
   • That is, a system dominated by a privileged bureaucracy which puts its own interests before those of the masses and a political leadership which represents this bureaucracy.
   • In other words, they must know how to motivate the bureaucracy through personal contacts, wining and dining, and red envelopes.
   • Needless to say, a gigantic new Labour bureaucracy has risen from the ground to serve it, with 570 on the payroll in England alone at one point.
   • This ruling is a victory for a distant bureaucracy over democratically elected authorities acting in the public good.
   • The foreign policy bureaucracy, not elected of course, plays a subordinate, non-political, essentially instrumental role.
   • The role of the school district bureaucracy shrinks to handing out money and administering the accountability program.
   • In Eastern Europe, the ruling bureaucracy suppressed every independent political movement of the working class.
   • The other prop for the Labour leadership is the union bureaucracies, the full time officials at the top of the hierarchy.
3. 1.3 Excessively complicated administrative procedure, seen as characteristic of bureaucracy.
   官僚作风
   the unnecessary bureaucracy in local government

   地方政府无谓的官僚作风。

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Serious executive authority is required to slice through the Kirk's ever-growing bureaucracy and its cumbersome administrative procedures.
   • There is no overbearing bureaucracy or complicated rules.
   • The unit will tackle unnecessary paperwork and reduce bureaucracy.
   • More than 3,600 staff will be given the chance to influence the way the trust is run by pointing out the unnecessary rules, paperwork and bureaucracy which slow them down.
   • Pupil behaviour, excessive workload and bureaucracy, teacher shortages and the stream of new Government initiatives have all been cited as causes.
   • But he insisted that the reductions could be found by tackling waste and administrative bureaucracy.
   • Labour regulation and bureaucracy would be swept away.
   • Contract manufacturers benefit from reduced layers of bureaucracy and more streamlined procedures.
   • He is coping with local government bureaucracy and finds the system not very frustrating.
   • Many things in India are complex because of massive bureaucracy, protocol and procedure.
   • That revealed 81.2% of teachers want to see levels of paperwork and bureaucracy in schools cut.
   • Colleges also suffered from excessive bureaucracy, he said.
   • Centralised student unions work best when freed from this unnecessary level of bureaucracy.
   • Creating laws that insist on transparency will also create a huge amount of paperwork, administration and bureaucracy and enforcement costs.
   • It is not Treaty settlement legislation but welfarism and bureaucracy, and it needs substantial amendment.
   • Of course, with their soviet training, the new eastern states should easily get to grips with the arcane procedures and bureaucracy of the EU.
   • They are burdened down with unnecessary bureaucracy and regulations.
   • Dragged down by the increased workload and snowed under by excessive bureaucracy, GPs feel no sense of involvement in the changes being made in the NHS.
   • And doctors who chose their vocation in order to cure the sick say unnecessary bureaucracy is eating into the time they have to care for patients and spend with their families.
   • They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer.

   Synonyms

   red tape, rules and regulations, etiquette, protocol, officialdom, paperwork, unnecessary paperwork