Government budget still a well-kept secret in China
- Source: The Global Times
- [20:56 May 25 2009]
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Illustration: Liu Rui
China’s first nationwide Regulations on Open Government Information (OGI Regulations) took effect on May 1 last year. Since that time, Chinese citizens have been deeply concerned about how the government collects taxes and where and how it spends the money.
According to the OGI Regulations, county-level governments and higher authorities should proactively disclose their financial budget and balance reports.
However, in practice, China’s deeply ingrained culture of government secrecy still looms. Facing applications from citizens for greater transparency of government finance, officials often reply with expressions of surprise: “How can I tell you that? It’s confidential.”
Wu Junliang, a citizen in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, was quite excited to find a 300-page budget report disclosed by the city government, which made Shenzhen the first city to publicize its financial budget to average citizens. However, after delving into the report, Wu was confused by at least three things.
First, there were no descriptions of responsibilities of various departments. Second, a multitude of enormous project funds seemed to indicate repeated billing for the same construction and the misuse of funds. Third, Wu said that over 1 billion yuan ($147 million) of the government’s budgetary outlay for 2008 appeared to be used for vehicle operation. The number was simply too large to believe.
This report, as well as the 2008 financial budget reports of the Ministries of Health, Education and Environmental Protection under the central government, was publicized on Budget of China, a website Wu founded. Wu and his employees made great efforts in collecting the information.
“So far, no department in China has really disclosed its departmental budget,” said Wu’s assistant. “They had so many excuses, and they just refused to disseminate the information.”
The idea among officials that all files concerning government finance are confidential hasn’t been changed yet.
Released by the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in 1997, the regulations concerning state secrets and their specific scopes and categories are in reality regarded as the “bible” in some government organizations.
Annual draft budgets and detailed financial statistics over the years are all stipulated as national secrets.
Jiang Hong, a professor of fiscal science at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, recently released a report of China’s financial transparency, in which the average score for governments in 31 provinces and regions across the nation was only 20 out of 100. Jiang also made a related ranking list of those local governments.
According to Jiang, some local governments tried to ask about their rankings on the list. They wanted to be neither too high nor too low– if they ranked too high, they would be regarded as doing a poor job in guarding national secrecy; but if their rankings looked too bad, they would be considered defying the OGI Regulations. They wanted to stay in the middle “safe” zone.
Some argue that one way out of this is to strengthen the supervision of government budgets by the National People’s Congress (NPC). “The most important responsibility of the NPC delegates is to check how the government has spent taxes. However, they often keep silent when examining the budget,” said Jiang.
(Southern Weekly)