As growth pangs have mounted, the average Chinese citizen has also discovered a great appetite for litigation, whether over unpaid wages, land acquisition or compensation issues. Courts in China today are handling a virtual avalanche of labour disputes with 5, 20,000 applications submitted last year, a 50 per cent increase over the previous year. There have also been personal stories of quiet courage shown by some lawyers in the face of intimidation and harassment for taking up ‘sensitive’ cases. The Open Constitution Initiative for instance, saw lawyers reach out last year to offer legal aid to thousands of Tibetans arrested after the March 2008 protests. The group is also offering similar legal assistance to the victims of milk powder poisoning. It is this “we are in this together” spirit and the banding together of various social groups that the leadership will increasingly look askance at. Such a fear is evident in the exhortations of Wu Heping, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security that expressions of resistance should be mindful of “public order” and that the masses should “resolve problems in a harmonious and an orderly way.”

For its part, the government has been at pains to be seen trying to do its best to respond to these social red alerts. There have been some moves to allow a measure of information disclosure on many of these sensitive issues. China’s first Open Government Information Regulation (OGI) that came into effect last May marks an interesting development. Comparable to India’s Right to Information Act, the OGI represents an attempt to institutionalise a commitment by government agencies to release information on a range of public services such as data on land acquisitions and compensation details among others. What is also significant is that this obligation applies to all levels of China’s vast bureaucratic apparatus, and notably also provides reasonable scope for local versions of the information access regimes to differ from that of the centre.  It will be interesting to watch this space for its promise of an expanding sphere of public action and greater transparency in the decision-making process.  

... contd.