China will no longer regard the death toll in natural disasters as a state secret, the official Xinhua news agency said on Monday, presenting the step as part of government efforts to improve transparency.
It gave no indication whether China would start retroactively revising death tolls from such disasters, for instance a famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Communist Party refers to as “three years of natural disasters.”
The famine claimed an estimated 30 million lives and has been blamed by many on Mao Zedong’s 1958 Great Leap Forward in which he urged farmers to abandon their fields and make steel in backyard furnaces as part of a drive to overtake Britain economically and catch up with the United States.
China “declassified” the death toll from natural disasters last month, Xinhua said.
“Declassification of these figures and materials is conducive to boosting our disaster prevention and relief work,” Xinhua quoted Shen Yongshe, spokesman of the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, as saying.
China announces death tolls from natural disasters such as typhoons and earthquakes through official channels such as Xinhua or government agencies, Unauthorized attempts to obtain such figures can lead to lengthy jail terms for stealing, or leaking, state secrets.
The decision marks a major step taken by the government toward “ruling according to law” and “building a transparent government,” Shen told the news conference jointly held by the administration and the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
“To continue to see natural disaster death tolls as state secrets makes it difficult to adapt to practical needs of the development of our disaster relief work and is not in accordance with general practices of the international community,” Xinhua said in a separate commentary.
Vague definition
Foreign journalists were not invited to the news conference, underscoring the political sensitivity of the issue.
China broadly defines as a state secret anything that affects the security and interests of the state, but the limits are vague. Rights groups say the laws are arbitrary enough to be manipulated for political purposes.
“I think it (the new policy) suits the process of opening up, but Chinese authorities stress the need to do it step by step. We hope it can be faster, but if it is moving forward, it is good,” said Zhan Jiang, dean of journalism at China Youth University for Political Sciences.
Western human rights and press watchdogs have accused the government of invoking the state secrets charge — a catch-all phrase covering speeches of government leaders to political reshuffles — to jail critics.
A court in the southern province of Hunan sentenced journalist Shi Tao to 10 years in prison in April for providing state secrets to an unidentified overseas publication.
Internet giant Yahoo has defended itself against accusations that it supplied information to Chinese authorities which led to Shi’s imprisonment, saying it has to abide by local laws.
Zhao Yan, a Chinese national and Beijing-based researcher of The New York Times, has been arrested on charges of leaking state secrets to foreigners.
In 1994, China sentenced Xi Yang, a reporter of Hong Kong’s Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper, to 12 years in prison for stealing state secrets — gold production figures and changes in the government’s policy on interest rates. He was paroled in 1997 ahead of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China.
China has a long track record of imposing news blackouts on accidents and disasters as well as falsifying figures.
The deaths of 85,000 people in the central province of Henan in 1975, when dams burst during a typhoon, were revealed only in a book on China’s worst disasters in the 20th century in 1998.
The Beijing Youth Daily revealed in April 1995 the details of the deadliest fire under Communist rule in which 694 people, including 597 children, died on Lunar New Year’s Day in a crowded cinema in the northwestern region of Xinjiang in 1977.
