Cai: This touches upon press freedom and its relationship with government secrecy. Our laws dealing with secrecy are excessively broad, and it takes things that aren't secretive, even things that must be known by the public, and shrouds them in secrecy… For example, when the NPC submits its working budget, it treats it as state secrets. Is this not absurd? Is budget information really a state secret? People have the right to know the government's budget…it's a fundamental, constitutional right granted by modern government.

EO: Actually, precisely because it's not public, because there is no public financial oversight, the phenomenon of "gray income" and corruption continue despite the repeated attention they've drawn.

Cai: Through these examples you can see, in the past what we called national interest, secrecy, national security, a lot of them were produced in the era of class struggle. We must right these concepts, and systematically clean up our secrecy, figure out once and for all what actually should be kept secret. The power of citizens over news, their basic constitutional rights, the power to know, should be greatly expanded. If information is kept secret it will inevitably lead to a "black box" mode of operation, the result of which is the abuse of power, waste, corruption, violation of law, and injury to the nation. Many issues must be re-considered and clarified from a systemic point of view, and many concepts freshly evaluated

Continued next week: The media is the driving force behind China's societal transformation.

[Original Chinese version]