“Transparency” (touming) is a popular buzzword in China as it is elsewhere. The English-language China Daily reports here about recent calls for increased transparency made by a high-level government official. The article reports:
“All administrative information pertaining to the interests of the public — except state secrets, business secrets and matters of personal privacy — must be made public,” said He Yong, deputy secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said at a national symposium on publicizing government affairs here recently.
Departments that do not obey the rules “will be punished seriously,” he said.
My reaction at this point in the article was, “Yeah, great. Amen”
The article continued:
The move is seen as another step of the Chinese Government towards building a transparent, clean and efficient government, part of its efforts to boost economic prosperity and social order.
It’s interesting that Xinhua’s proffered rationale for greater transparency is that it will lead to greater economic prosperity and “social order.” I think that’s probably true, but obviously in a democratic system you could predicate a call for transparency on the notion that citizens simply have the right to know what their government is doing, regardless of its affect on wealth creation and even if it would lead to short-term disquiet.
Still, I think increasing transparency is a good thing, even if the motive is not political liberalism. Indeed, increasing transparency on economic rationales would seem to bolster the idea that economic liberalization will encourage political liberalization, that “constructive engagement” is the right policy approach because, inter alia, economic liberalization can be a Trojan horse for political liberalization.
I think there has been a steady, incremental increase in transparency in PRC government operations in recent years. But, still, this headline “China Promotes transparent government” overstates realities.
Let me give an example. For months I have been trying to get my hands on a series of judicial decisions issued by the Harbin Intermediate People Court. The judgments are for lawsuits brought by shareholders against Daqing Lianyi, a listed PRC company that the CSRC has determined inflated its profits in order to become listed and then continued to make false disclosure after its listing. These Harbin decisions are the first court judgments to come down in group litigation cases (gongtong susong) since the PRC Supreme People’s Court issued rules on private shareholder litigation. I wrote an article about the SPC’s rules on shareholder litigation, so naturally I am quite interested in how the actual cases are now being handled.
The PRC press has reported widely that the trial court issued judgments in favor of some of the plaintiffs, and Xuan Weihua, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, has given many interviews complaining about some aspects of the judgments. However, I need to read the actual judgments–not just press reports about them–to write a follow-up piece, and so far I have been unable to get my hands on copies of the judgments. Ostensibly, they are public records. But they aren’t in the public domain. These “public” records are being kept secret. Lawyers involved in the case are reluctant to share copies of the judgments, knowing they are “sensitive.” But these are not documents related to the national security of China. They are court records about shareholders suing a listed company for disclosure fraud. If they are “sensitive” it must be because the court is reluctant to expose its rationales to public scrutiny or some factual aspect of the case is embarrassing to the government. In either event, someone has decided the decisions shouldn’t be public, and they aren’t.
So I agree China needs to increase transparency. The headline “China promotes transparent government” should be understood to mean “China’s secretive government is beginning to allow transparency in some areas while maintaining black box operations in other areas.”
Old, politically embedded habits will die hard, so there is likely to be room to increase transparency in PRC government operations for a long time.
