Over half of local govts found to be lacking in information disclosure

A report on governmental transparency revealed on Monday shows that over half of county- level governments lag behind in terms of public information disclosure and website construction.

About 60 percent of the local governments among 100 surveyed counties are ranked low in terms of releasing public information, according to report by the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ( CASS), The Beijing News said on Monday.

The websites of these local governments and their units were found to be poorly built, which would affect the publication of information, the report revealed. Many of these websites had floating signs, some of which could not be closed and therefore were suspected of being a deliberate act to force netizens to read certain type of content. A few local government websites only carried a picture.

Among the county- level governments, Nangxian county in Nyingchi prefecture of Tibet Autonomous Region got the lowest score of 12.75, while Lhasa ranked the lowest among the city- level governments with 40.71.

The annual reports on government information disclosure were also found to be deficient, with over 90 percent of the content in the reports being repetitive, Lü Yanbin, the writer of the CASS report, was quoted by The Beijing News as saying.

Some governments copied their own previous reports, reports of other departments and even of departments in other cities, Lü said.

The Pudong District of Shanghai, and Ningguo city of Anhui Province topped the list of the prefecture- and county- level governments in terms of website development. Among the cities, Xiamen in Fujian Province and Guangzhou in Guangdong Province got highest scores, according to the CASS report. The report is based on an evaluation of government performance in 49 cities and 100 counties in China in 2016.