Powerful China struggles with transparent government
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Powerful and wealthy are words many Chinese would use to describe their government. It may be wealthy, but it is a stretch to describe it as powerful. The government has issued a string of regulations intended to damp real estate speculation, but house prices stubbornly keep rising. And it has been promising for years to publish detailed budgets but so far we have seen little action.
At the recent National People's Congress (NPC) Premier Wen Jiabao again promised to speed up work on publishing the budget.
"We will release government budgets more quickly to the people to keep them informed on how much the government spends and what it spends money on. Governments at all levels need to work hard to accomplish practical results for the people; and all public servants should become genuine servants of the people," Wen was quoted as saying.
Some people saw Wen's remarks as reflecting the administration's determination to improve fiscal transparency. But since he also announced the numerous clampdowns on house prices, many remain deeply skeptical.
Last year, more than 70 central government departments posted their budgets on the Internet. In the same year, 12 provincial level regions, disclosed their spending statements to the public on a monthly or quarterly basis. But most of the figures were very general, and the smallest category of expenditure was still in tens of billions of yuan, making it hard to see the details of government spending. The design of the websites has also been widely criticized. People can rarely find useful information; mainly there are just phone numbers that are never answered.
The Guangzhou municipal government started to release government budgets in 2009 with a web page listing 114 local departments. By last year, the number of departments listing their budgets had been cut to 21. The dedicated web page had also disappeared, so citizens have to visit each department's website accordingly to get the information. This year in Beijing, the municipal government decided to let 58 departments post their budgets online, compared with 45 departments last year. But days after Premier Wen's report, 34 departments still haven't released any budget information.
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