Beijing – China said Monday that it would no longer treat the death toll in natural disasters as a state secret, a step that could lead to greater transparency in a country that has a long history of providing partial or misleading data about diseases, accidents, and state-directed atrocities.
The National Administration of State Secrets, a government agency that oversees the vast array of data deemed secret, announced the declassification of disaster-related death tolls, which the agency said had been carried out last month.
The rules will apparently apply mainly to purely natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods and typhoons. The change may allow Chinese officials and the state media greater leeway to report on such events as they unfold, rather than waiting for the official version to be released, usually by the state- run New China News Agency.
If carried out as advertised, the timely release of casualty figures after accidents would be a modest step toward what officials have called “building a transparent government,” a goal they have professed for many years.
Information about casualties in storms and floods is no longer routinely suppressed in China, as it was before the country opened its doors to the outside world a quarter-century ago. The new rules are unlikely to lead to the release of data not currently available in some form.
But the revised regulations may make it more difficult for local officials to cover up accidents on the grounds of protecting state secrets, as they have often done in the past.
As recently as this summer, officials were accused of providing a false death toll for a flash flood that wiped out a school and killed scores of children in the northern province of Heilongjiang.