Top lawyer urges China to reveal budgets to public

Yan Yiming: a prominent investors' rights advocate

YAN YIMING, one of China's highest-profile lawyers, best known for his handling of cases of corporate fraud, has demanded the Beijing government open its books to the public and publish details of 2008 and 2009 budgets.

It's an unusually direct form of approach and could earn the ire of the Communist Party, which sees this kind of activism as a growing threat to its rule.

Mr Yan said the government must live up to its promises of more transparency, and formally presented an application to the Finance Ministry headquarters demanding that it publish details of its 2008 expenditure and 2009 budget.

The move comes amid rising public unease as the economy slows and jobless figures rise.

The legal community has been at the forefront of the movement for greater accountability and openness in China, and often proponents have to work in very difficult circumstances.

The blind, "barefoot lawyer" Chen Guangcheng was jailed in 2006 for his legal-related activism, while the country's most prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has been in detention since 2007.

Mr Yan is a prominent investors' rights advocate who first caused a stir in 1998 when he tried to sue a state-owned television maker in Sichuan. As the legal environment evolved to give more protection to shareholders, he won a string of cases against firms that falsified financial information, acting for powerless minority shareholders.

"Our government must exercise its power in the open sunlight. As our president Hu Jintao has expressed, the government must be extremely clean in serving the people," Mr Yan wrote.

Last year, access-to-information rules were introduced requiring the government to free up details about matters affecting the public interest, which were largely intended as part of a bid to stamp out corruption. However, expectations that anyone would make use of the law were low.

The Communist Party reveals little about how it does business and spends revenues, and every year the budget is passed unanimously by a cheering audience.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times