New regulation on government transparency has welcome details

THE STATE COUNCIL, China's Cabinet, published a detailed regulation on promoting transparency of governmental affairs earlier this week. Compared with similar past regulations, the new one, for the first time, clearly requires local governments and departments to respond to major incidents of concern to the public within five hours, and hold press conferences within 24 hours. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

Increasingly more local governments or departments find themselves too slow to react to incidents of concern to the public. In the past, when some incident happened, officials usually had plenty of time to discuss how to deal with it, but nowadays that's no longer the case.

To make it more difficult, the public are paying increasingly more attention to government affairs. Many rumors emerge this way, with the public eager to know and the local government officials too slow to react.