Law to promote gov't transparency
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More public-access lawsuits will be accepted by courts and these will in turn prompt governments to be more transparent, Ren said.
However, Gu Haibin, a law professor from Renmin University of China, thinks that more legislation should be made requiring transparency of government information, and that more needs to be publicized.
"Transparency of government should be written into law, not just a code," Gu said. "The top legislature should make a more specific explanation on what should not be publicized."
Asking for government information is still risky, like the recent example of a man asking for details of budgets in different cities, Gu said.
On Oct 9, Li Detao, a 26-year-old man working in a financial company, asked financial bureaus in Shanghai and Guangzhou for government expense budgets. Eight days later, he received different answers.
Guangzhou bureau officials told Li that they will publicize the budget on its website. Later that day the website of Guangzhou finance bureau was overloaded by 40,000 Internet users after the bureau released detailed government expense budgets available for free download by the public.
Li's answer from the Shanghai finance bureau was that they cannot publicize information about the budget as "the budget is a national secret".
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