Most countries, including the United States, struggle to strike a balance between the need to keep some government information secret in the interest of national security and the need to provide free access to most information in the interest of popular participation and economic development.
China's government is still reluctant to acknowledge that citizens have a 'right to know', and while it has in recent years developed 'open government' information regulations, they are replete with loopholes and exceptions. So when China revised its State Secrets Law earlier this month, many commentators pored through the document sceptically. China has long maintained an expansive definition of state secrets subject to few limitations and with almost no meaningful review mechanism. This has not only led to overzealous guarding of sensitive or embarrassing information, but has also sustained the aggressive prosecution of people suspected of illegally obtaining, possessing or revealing such data.
The case of Australian national Stern Hu recently attracted worldwide attention, which is thought to be the reason why the charges against him were downgraded from stealing state secrets to illegally obtaining commercial secrets. Yet most Chinese state secrets prosecutions remain shrouded in mystery and receive little attention. American geologist Xue Feng, for example, has been detained in police custody since November 2007 on charges of unlawfully procuring state secrets - an oil industry database - and 'intelligence'. For two years the case, never publicly revealed by China, was unknown to the media at the insistence of Xue's wife. Xue was finally given a closed trial last July, but there is still no verdict, and Beijing's No 1 Intermediate Court appears to have exhausted the legal excuses for its procrastination.
The US government has been so outraged about Xue's mistreatment, which included torture early in the investigation, that ambassador Jon Huntsman or his deputy, Robert Goldberg, have personally made the monthly official visits permitted under the Sino-American consular agreement to meet Xue on seven occasions, an unprecedented show of concern. Even US President Barack Obama has requested the consideration of China's highest leaders.
The new State Secrets Law, which goes into effect on October 1, will do little to improve this type of situation. Its revisions indicate that China's leaders are aware of the potential for abuse of the power to classify information, but it is equally apparent that they are not ready to unequivocally deter abuse at the expense of government discretion. The law is thus full of provisions that appear to limit arbitrary or extended classifications and increase transparency, but which ultimately preserve secrecy as a powerful tool for media control and persecution of those who fall foul of the government.
The purported narrowing of the vast scope of information that can be designated secret, for example, is more apparent than real. The new language merely requires that such information, if leaked, might harm state interests in broad areas such as politics, economics and diplomacy. Similar requirements are already present in other sections retained from the previous law. Yet how likely such harm must be has never been clarified, nor is there any reduction of the categories of information that may be shielded.