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This should have been a given: The obligation of a government who addresses itself as belonging to the people to subject its accounting books to the public.
Even the Communist Party chief of out-of-the-way Baimiao township in Sichuan province shows how obvious this is when he said: “In order for power to operate in sunshine, financial expenditures must be made public”.
When the remote Baimiao township government published detailed accounts of its expenditures, even down to a 1.5-yuan purchase of a pad of writing paper, on its website, it made quite a stir.
Although the Baimiao Party chief insists that what they have done is perfectly normal, no other government body in China has done this before. Baimiao has thus earned the name as “the first naked township government.”
There have been cases of local governments providing ambiguous breakdowns of their expenditures at the request of inquisitive citizens. But the recent decree for governments to disclose information has yet to shake them out of their unwillingness for transparency. In October, for instance, the municipal government of Shanghai turned down a request for information on the grounds that government expenditures are “state secrets”.
We have heard suspicions of sensationalism in the Baimiao case. We have seen plenty of political posturing by government officials trying to capture the media limelight. But we would love it if all governments followed the Baimiao township.
Following Baimiao’s example has a downside for officials: Public scrutiny may considerably compromise the latitude of officials in spending public money. But, just as the Baimiao Party chief has discovered, it can also do some good.
The move has helped local officials get rid of public suspicions of corruption, and in turn boosted public confidence.
For those complaining about our public being cynical and themselves unfairly suspected, Baimiao has shown a way out. And that is the only way out of the governments’ public relations debacle.
