Freedom of information and information management in China: an empirical study

Abstract

Description: The Open Government Information Regulation of the People’s Republic of China (OGIR) – the Chinese version of freedom of information legislation in other contexts – was issued by the State Council of China in 2007. As the only concept defined by OGIR, government information refers to “that of being produced or acquired and recorded or kept in certain forms by administrative organs in the process of performing their duties”. Accompanying this rather broad conceptualization of government information are rules stipulating information opening approaches, namely proactive dissemination and disclosing by request, similar to those in other countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom. A research interest emerged due to the observations gained from analyzing literature on the OGIR – which possesses a sizeable body, and that is, the absence of studies/discussions on relationships between the OGIR and the information management (IM) functions in governmental organizations. Questions were raised as a result: why is there such silence on relationships between the opening of information and the management of information, which, in theory (at least), should be indispensable to the discharging of duties regarding opening information? This presentation introduces the study that aims at answering these questions and reports on its preliminary findings.