From the Washington Post:
China on Tuesday announced far-reaching new rules for disclosure of official information that would require local governments to reveal their accounts and inform farmers about the finances of often controversial land seizures.
The decree, which takes effect May 1, 2008, would mark a dramatic change in the way Chinese officials work if it were genuinely applied in Beijing and the hundreds of thousands of villages and towns where governments and Communist Party committees make most of their decisions in secrecy. The official New China News Agency called it a “landmark” decision that makes “the most specific and progressive” changes to China’s tradition of official secrecy since Communist rule began in 1949.
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