Pilot project to improve transparency succeed
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Four cities in China have successfully implemented a pilot program that requires public officials to post information about their finances, officials said.
Inspectors in Xiangxiang, a prefecture-level city in Hunan province, are calling the project a success after the first month of its implementation.
Inspectors said earlier in the week that the local government's decision to make the housing conditions of all its leading officials publicly accessible had received enormous "support and endorsement" from the people.
Since Nov 2, the Xiangxiang government has, on its own website, released detailed housing information - including the total area of the apartment and the per square meter cost - of each of its 69 leading officials.
Inspectors have confirmed the information one by one with construction authorities, local media reports said.
According to the figures, completed and submitted by the officials themselves, all but one of the 69 officials had houses under their names. Some 51 officials had one apartment listed, while 16 had two and one had three.
Xinxiang's Party chief Li Shihong allegedly has the smallest apartment of all the officials, with an 86 sq m suite. The size of most other cadres' apartments exceeds 120 sq m.
The local government's move has been widely applauded online, especially as many officials in other localities, who see the exposure of their finances as an intrusion of their privacy, remain opposed to the idea.
Some netizens, however, are demanding greater openness from the authorities. For example, an administrator at the Xiangxiang Forum with "Xiangxiang Laotou" as an alias questioned the fact that a certain cadre bought his second apartment in 2004 at a price of about 700 yuan ($102) per square meter.
The property price then in Xiangxiang was in the lower thousands, he claimed.
Others at the People's Daily online forum, meanwhile, point to the fact that the Xiangxiang government has not asked its officials to expose housing property under the names of their children - a common practice among corrupt politicians.
Xiangxiang, under the administration of Xiangtan city, home of the late chairman Mao Zedong, is the fourth city in China to have adopted a mechanism to expose the property of its local officials.
Altay in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Cixi in Zhejiang province and Liuyang in Hunan province have each implemented a similar system that requires leading local cadres to publicly expose information such as their personal income, property, and the employment and education of their spouses and children.
But the system has not made available the information of the top local leaders in any of these three cities, where property declaration has only been applied to the medium-level officials and grass-roots cadres.
Some argue that all officials, even the top level, should be required to post their personal information.
"The focus of a property declaration system is just that - to expose the property of the major leaders," said Ren Jianming, director of the clean politics and governance research Center at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management.
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