Budget openness not enough

On Friday, more than 100 central departments made public their 2017 annual budgets, with the Ministry of Education among those doing so first.

That a growing number of government departments are disclosing their annual budget information marks concrete progress toward building a transparent government budget.

But despite the tangible progress that has been made in recent years, the budget transparency of public departments is still far from satisfactory. For various reasons, a large number of public departments that should make public their budgets fail to do so, and no targeted indexes are introduced to the budgets of subprojects under a key project.

Besides, even economics experts find it difficult to work where and how money has been spent because of the absence of detailed information in plain language.

The newly-revised Budget Law stipulates that public departments should make public their budget information, but it has no specific stipulations on what happens if a department fails to comply with this legal requirement. The country's interim provisions on the accountability of Party and government officials stipulate that derelictions of duty or behavior that cause "heavy losses" or has a "very bad influence" on national interests, people's lives and property, and public property will be held accountable when it comes to the openness of budget.

Only after all of its budgets are made public and an effective accountability mechanism is put in place for spending on every item can the concept of building a responsible government be really fulfilled. In this respect, people's congresses at various levels should be granted more power to hold violators accountable while exercising their power of ratifying, adjusting and vetoing the budget of same-level governments.

The country should strengthen the application of budget openness under the Budget Law, the State Secrecy Law and the regulation on government information disclosure to offer judicial guarantees for citizens or social organizations to possibly appeal to government departments for budget openness.