A version of freedom of information legislation takes effect in China from today.
This does not mean, however, that the Government has conceded the citizen’s right to know; only that it has accepted that, to improve governance, its officials should be prompted to release more information.
The new national disclosure regulation in theory requires China’s governments at every level to provide information that affects the immediate interests of individual citizens and organisations. However, a pilot program, introduced in 2004 in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan, three of China’s biggest cities, indicates the chances of Chinese journalists making use of this embryonic freedom of information regulation are very slim.
In these four years, in cities whose combined population is almost twice that of Australia, there has been only one request formally lodged by a journalist: Ma Sheng, a writer on legal affairs for Liberation Daily in Shanghai, a newspaper owned by the city’s Communist Party.
CDT EBOOKS
Subscribe to CDT
SUPPORT CDT
Giving Assistant
Anti-censorship Tools
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
