Open government can sell China overseas

• Source: Global Times
• [21:01 March 14 2010]
• Comments

Illustration: Liu Rui
 
By Iain Mills

Chinese politics is invariably looked upon with skepticism by Western media and observers. For us, it is hard to comprehend the opaque structures, unforthcoming officials and general lack of transparency and accountability.

There is no greater example of this than the National People's Congress (NPC). Every spring, Beijing's roads are cordoned off and security increases as delegates meet in the Great Hall of the People to hammer out policies for the forthcoming year. Media coverage and access is carefully planned with limited changes from year to year.

To the outsider, the internal mechanisms of these meetings remain an unknown, and Chinese citizens have extremely limited access to their top officials. Despite significant efforts by the government to increase transparency in its activities, many in China and abroad remain dubious of these processes, and the NPC is generally seen as a "rubber stamp parliament."

But perhaps the difference between the NPC and other parliaments isn't that great. Take the following scenario: In "Country X," journalists and pressure groups have for years been calling for the government to release details of parliamentary expenses claims. The government has used every trick in the book to reject these calls, from stonewalling to claiming the information could harm national security.

Finally, a newspaper gets hold of the entire file and, despite a desperate last-ditch attempt by the un-elected leader to impose a media injunction, the newspaper publishes the claims in full.

The details are startling: Parliamentarians have been cooking the books, dodging taxes, telling lies and charging the taxpayer for everything from duck pond ornaments to manure to tampons - for a man.

And which country is this? Some tin-pot African dictatorship? A secretive Asian regime or a corrupt cabal of South American generals? The answer is, of course, the UK, the oldest democracy in the world and home to "the mother of parliaments."

Admittedly, the amounts are only in the tens of thousands of pounds at worst, numbers which in many countries would barely register on the scale of official corruption, and it was a case of dubious use of expenses rather than bribery or outright embezzlement.

But nevertheless the UK expenses scandal revealed the ability of the British political system to hide in-formation from the public.

The gory details were only made public after an employee leaked them to the media; otherwise, we would still be none the wiser.

Problems of transparency, accountability and officials serving their own interests exist within all political systems. Israel's repeated contraventions of international law generally go unpunished, and US human rights rhetoric is rarely aimed at oil-rich Middle East countries.

Thus, the challenge facing the Chinese government is twofold: Not only must it improve transparency and ac-countability in its political systems, but it also needs to become more streetwise in its dealings with the media, particularly the foreign media.