The capital of South China's Guangdong Province is beefing up efforts to shed light on how governmental purchases are made.

Projects involving a purchasing value of more than 500,000 yuan (US$60,240) will be subject to public bidding, and projects involving a purchasing value over 5 million yuan (US$602,410) will be additionally subject to the supervision of varied governmental departments, according to Xie Yuexian, deputy director-general of Guangzhou Financial Bureau.

Petty governmental purchases can only be done at fixed locales and fuel purchases for governmental vehicles can only be done at certain gas stations, she added.

The city will expand the coverage of governmental purchases and the municipal government is redoubling efforts to improve the purchasing management system and fortify supervision to make the procedure more open, fair and transparent.

To that end, Xie said the city's purchasing center will soon be divorced from the municipal financial bureau, which will be responsible for supervision of the former's operation.

And experts will have more say in any governmental purchase, she noted.

The city has recently developed a management software to appraise governmental purchases, pooling some 3,000 experts for 200 purchasing categories. The experts will be chosen by random sampling and automatically informed by voice phone one day before the appraisal, thereby minimizing concerns about "unfair play.''

The city's governmental purchases currently cover 80 categories of projects, compared to six categories in 2000.Total purchasing volume is expected to top 2 billion yuan (US$240.96 million) this year.

Governmental purchases for the January-July period totaled 918 million yuan (US$110.60 million), 149 million yuan (US$17.95 million) more than a year ago.

The city spent 3.30 billion yuan (US$396.99 million) on governmental purchases between 2000 and 2002, saving 461 million yuan (US$55.54 million), official statistics indicate.

The city tendered bids for the purchase of governmental vehicles in late 1998 and set up a purchasing center in early 2000, marking the official kick start of the programme to illuminate purchasing practices on goods, services and engineering projects.

(China Daily August 26, 2003)