THE past year can be called a harvest time for the city's democracy and legal system construction work, thanks to two solid steps taken in this respect.

On May 1, a regulation making government information more accessible to the public went into effect. It stipulates that all government documents should be made available for public scrutiny as long as their release do not infringe an individual's right to privacy, commercial confidentiality or reveal State secrets (see the story "Towards transparency" in the February 12 issue).

The regulation also gives residents the right to request any public information they wish to know even if it is only to satisfy their own curiosity.

"It is a revolution," Ma Ling, a Shanghai Municipal People's Congress deputy said when appraising the regulation.

"The government collects about 80 per cent of all the formal information in society. The old system, which was very secretive, kept most of this information out of public reach even though it contained no real secrets as set out in the country's law."

Some progress has already been seen in government transparency since the implementation of the regulation, she said.

"Local residents are now allowed to attend meetings of the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress, and each government sector has actively publicized their information on websites."

Another piece of milestone legislation is the Administrative Licensing Law, which was put into force on July 1 (see stories "Ripping up the red tape" and "Breaking the family mode" in April 14 issue). The law put an end to the so-called stamp journeys which had plagued Chinese for so long.

It was reported in the Legal Daily early this year that a company selling construction materials in Beijing wanted to open a chain store somewhere in Northwest China.

Knowing that the procedures to get the business licence were troublesome in China, the boss decided to take out 600,000 yuan (US$72,289) and planned to spend a year getting through all the procedures.

Three years, more than 5 million yuan (US$602,000) and 100 stamps later, he was still told he had skipped certain procedures.

Such stories have not been uncommon in China.

A report said that an automobile company in Shanghai spent 191 million yuan (US$23 million) obtaining a variety of administrative approvals to start its business. That amounted to 1.36 per cent of the enterprise's overall investment.

According to Xu Qiang, director of the Shanghai Legal Affairs Administrative Office, a construction project in Shanghai might sometimes has required 157 stamps before a licence to start work would be issued. Even if everything went smoothly, it took 355 working days to get everything done.

After the implementation of the Administrative Licensing Law, the number of required stamps was reduced to 17, and the time required to obtain them was reduced to around 70 days.

According to the new law, there are now only six areas in which the governments can require licences: industries concerning State security, public safety, environmental protection, the use of limited natural resources, public service industries which have direct impact on the public welfare and a few licences clearly required under other laws.

Even in these six areas, the law stipulates that if the business can be standardized through self-regulation by individuals, the market, intermediate sectors, or by enhancing the government's capacities for retrospective inspection, licences should not be required.

Statistics show that the Shanghai government has deleted half of its administrative licences under the new law this year.

However, with democracy and the legal environment improving in the city, the number of legal cases brought against government sectors has markedly increased.

A recent report from the Shanghai High People's Court said that local courts received a total of 1,750 administrative cases from January to November this year, an increase of 21.78 per cent over the same period last year. Many of these are new cases, often relating to public information and administrative licensing. Xiao Pan