Opinion google.cn: Page Not Found

The trouble with running such a simple search on China’s transparency credentials is that it misses three critical keywords: legitimacy,accountability and governance.

It misses for instance the fundamental reality that non-democratic systems too need to be responsive,transparent and accountable to their people. Remember,unlike

democratic systems,they lack the representative safe zone of popular elections providing an easy claim to legitimacy. The performance-oriented basis of its accountability thus typically makes the Chinese system acutely vulnerable to governance deficits. This is brought home by rising public anger on several occasions,be it over infant deaths due to contaminated milk,the Harbin toxic spill,lead poisoning in Gansu and arsenic poisoning in Hunan. It explains the urgency with which the government is courting public opinion and why it wishes to be seen as doing its best to defray these social costs. Thus,from kiosks in government buildings for citizens to access information to putting reams of government documents online,China is spelling out its intent to guide,shape,channel the info-structure as well as control public opinion.

A recent accountability initiative introduced with much hype is a right to information initiative called the Open Government Information (OGI) Regulation. It could be a weather vane to how Beijing manages the politics of information

access both for its high symbolic content as well as the political signals it sends out. Announcing the OGI in 2008,the Vice-Minister Zhang Qiong of the State Council’s Office of Legislative Affairs defined it as facilitating “the public’s right to know”. It represents an attempt to institutionalise a commitment by government agencies to disclose

information relating to a range of public services such as raising public awareness on government social programmes,data on land acquisitions,compensation details,etc. What is also significant is that this obligation applies to all levels of China’s vast bureaucratic apparatus and notably also provides a reasonable scope for local versions of the information access regimes to differ from that of the centre.

The experience of the working of the OGI already shows that the Chinese people are demanding their right to know in increasing numbers and in increasingly loud voices. Ordinary citizens are holding local authorities to account on projects and issues ranging from how money collected from highway and bridge tolls are being used,the decision-making process involved in urban housing demolition and land acquisition cases or the restructuring of state companies. Many Chinese cities have been taking the lead to release information to the public even before the national regulation came into effect. The Shanghai government,for instance,is reported to have thus far placed more than 400,000 pages of information in the public domain. Guangzhou scored a first by disclosing the budgets of individual government departments. China’s first Pollution Information Transparency Index Report brought out in 2008 is based on proactive disclosures by 113 cities across China on the environmental impact of local projects.

Firewalls? For sure. Transparency with Chinese characteristics is no silver bullet fix for accountability deficits. The discretionary nature of these government initiatives leaves them open to backsliding when political comfort levels dip. But there is no denying that a civic space has been opened — a space to be contested,claimed and secured by the Chinese citizen. It will be interesting to watch this space for its scope to raise the bar on government accountability. Don’t log out just yet. 

The writer is an associate professor at the Centre for Policy Research,Delhi

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