First 'naked' government

This should have been a given: The obli-gation 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".

And 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.