Great wall of secrecy is crumbling

World news from The Times and the Sunday Times - Times Online :: Jane Macartney in Beijing: "TAKING a giant step towards greater transparency, China’s highly secretive Government is to publish death tolls from natural disasters. The move could prevent the kind of cover-up by regional authorities two years ago over the spread of Sars.

Deaths in natural disasters have gone mostly unreported because of secrecy laws and because the Communist Party saw them as damaging to its reputation. But in recent years, with the proliferation of local newspapers, bad news has been harder to suppress. Reports of disasters appear with increasing frequency and little delay.

Tens of millions of people are believed to have died in natural and man-made disasters since the Communists gained power in 1949. An estimated 20 million to 40 million people died during a three-year famine that began in 1959 and has been blamed on Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in 1958, in which he urged farmers to leave the fields and make steel in back-yard furnaces.

Attempts to obtain figures from disasters, from earthquakes to typhoons, can result in jail terms for stealing, or leaking, state secrets, which can be anything that affects China’s interests or security. The Communist Party often uses the hazy definition to silence critics. It has been imbued with secrecy since its foundation as an underground movement whose members were hunted by warlords, rival Nationalists and Japanese invaders.

Mr Hu, who took office in 2002, must feel more confident about his power as he consolidates his authority through the provinces, installing his own people into key positions. But he remains an authoritarian leader of a secretive government.

It was unclear if figures for past disasters would be published. Attempts to obtain details from the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets were in vain: the telephone number is classified.

DEATHLY SILENCE


1977 Fire in a Xinjiang cinema kills 597 children and 97 adults. Disclosed by Beijing Youth Daily in 1995

1976 Quake in Tangshan kills 250,000. No figure revealed for many years

1975 Dams burst during a typhoon in Henan province — 85,000 die. Revealed in a 1998 book

1959-61 The Great Leap Forward — Chairman Mao’s social experiment — led to famine that may have cost up to 40 million lives. Very rarely mentioned by Chinese official media"