Chinese journalists outraged as Heilongjiang EPB deems pollution figures confidential
Last week, controversy erupted at the the Heilongjiang Provincial government’s 2009 enforcement and environmental emergency management work meeting. Ten media outlets were invited by the provincial government to attend as observers. According to this article, two Xinhua journalists were stopped by a government official when they attempted to photograph internal documents listing pollution violators, information that the Heilongjiang Environmental Protection Bureau was legally obligated to disclose. Instead, an official told them that the information they wanted was considered “confidential,” and that the information currently in existence was “enough” for the media. Upon having their requests rebuffed, many journalists left the room in protest.
The incident has become headline news in China in the last week, and a plethora of opinion pieces have been penned concerning the controversy. In addition to the Chinese media, English-language blogs such as China Environmental Law and the Wu Way have also picked up on the story.
Here’s what the Chinese media has to say about the controversy.
This Xinhua article on April 21, which also gives details on the photography incident, takes a stance against the official’s confidentiality claim. It asks,
How can it be that information meant to be disclosed and publicly supervised is kept confidential from the media and the public? Especially information regarding enterprises’ illegal discharge of pollutants – how can this “confidentiality” protect the people’s right to know and right to supervise?
An op-ed in the Yanzhao Metropolitan Post calls the incident an “embarrassment” and points out how Articles IX and X of the national open government information regulations require disclosure of this information. Later on it elaborates,
In a few days, the Open Government Information Regulations will see the first anniversary of their implementation on May 1. How can we evaluate the regulations, now that a “focus on public information” has been turned into “confidentiality of all facts?” Even if this incident does not make the regulations seem “a mere piece of scrap paper,” at the very least it is a complete embarrassment.
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[...] information. Heilongjiang’s refusal to release information about polluting enterprises (here and here) last week is a fitting coda to a first year fraught with open information ups and downs. [...]
[...] information. Heilongjiang’s refusal to release information about polluting enterprises (here and here) last week is a fitting coda to a first year fraught with open information ups and downs. [...]