CHINA: China will no longer regard the death toll in natural disasters as a state secret, the official Xinhua news agency said yesterday, 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," the news agency 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. Unauthorised attempts to obtain such figures can lead to lengthy jail terms for stealing or leaking state secrets.
Two Chinese democracy campaigners living in exile in the US have filed a lawsuit against Chinese president Hu Jintao for persecution and libel ahead of his meeting with US president George W Bush.
Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and Wang Juntao, branded a "black hand" mastermind of the pro-democracy movement, said in a statement the Chinese government had persecuted them by rejecting applications to renew their passports and denying them their right to return home. - (Reuters)