The issue of how to tighten supervision of government budget implementation have been or are being mooted by legislatures in various Chinese provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions since late January.

The provincial people's congress of Guangdong, in south China, has created a network of all computer terminals in the province's 80 governmental units, which receive financial appropriation.

Details, such as how much the governmental departments pay their staff and how many new cars a unit recently bought, could be automatically known by the local legislature.

Therefore, Guangdong's budget is now much easier for deputies to supervise.

Last year, the provincial government's misuse of 20 million yuan (US$2.42 million) of budget for building a kindergarten for its own staff had been audited out and compelled by deputies to rectify.

Liu Kun, director of the provincial financial department, expressed his welcome for the budget supervision from the People's Congress, saying the enhanced supervision will be conducive to building a transparent financial system.

Meanwhile, Sichuan Provincial People's Congress also beefed up its efforts on budget supervision. Considering that most of deputies were not finances majors, the local legislature held a number of lectures on budget and auditing knowledge for its deputies, aiming to increase their budget supervision capacity.

Local legislatures of Hubei Province, in central China, and Anhui Province in east China, are also planning to connect computer terminals of budget-receiving departments with its own, in an effort to keep a close eye on budget use.

Opening hot lines between citizens and deputies is another channel to reinforce local legislature's function of supervision. Citizens can use the hotlines to make deputies aware of some social contradictions that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. 

A host of social problems, such as private enterprise's negligence of paying social insurance for workers, expensive medicines and hospitalization, and female workers' early retirement, were frequently mentioned by common citizens through hot lines.

Zhou Yue, a deputy to the Yunnan provincial people's congress, said that hearing suggestions or grievances from commoners through hot lines helped acquaint him with the problems in his region.

(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2005)