A Study On The Government Information Disclosure During Emergency Response

With the development of reform and opening up, our nation’s constructionof political civilization places increasing emphasis on the public’s rights to know,participate, express and to supervise. The emergency response, as one of thegovernment’s major tasks, is supposed to protect these fours rights, whichrequires that the administrative agencies adapt to the new job requirements aswell as the new environment of public opinion and also improve the ability towork. Generally, an emergency begins with a problem or disaster anddeteriorates to a crisis if the communication fails and the conflicts intensify. As aresult, the crisis communication should be given the top priority duringemergency response. The government information disclosure, being consideredto be an important part of the emergency response in its capacity building andadministration according to the law, occupies a key position in crisiscommunication. A good implementation of government information disclosure will help to improve the crisis communication ability, and thus benefit theemergency response.This article starts by giving definitions to the terms as emergency,government information disclosure, and by introducing their main forms inorder to provide the focus of discussion in this article——the informationdisclosure, to a large extent, determines the success of the emergency response,and acts as one of the key means in emergency response.The information disclosure is of great significance to the emergencyresponse. In this article, we have analyzed the emergency’s current situation,studied the regulations related to information disclosure in several relevant lawsand plans such as the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic ofChina, the National Emergency Response Plan to the Natural Disaster Relief, theNational Overall Emergency Response Plan to the Public Emergencies, and thendiscussed the dramatic information increase as well as the most neededinformation for the citizens and stakeholders involved in this emergency bydividing the analysis into three aspects: decision-making, publication andcoordination, supervision and security. We included that the appropriation andtiming of information disclosure determines largely the success of emergencyresponse.As for the present domestic situation of emergency response, this article hassummed up several inadequacies in the government information disclosure fromthe three aspects mentioned above. We may cite some examples from all the inadequacies concluded: the information disclosure awareness in publicdecision-making should be strengthened; the ability of information disclosureaccording to the law should be improved; the main responsible body should beclearer in the publication and coordination of information disclosure; thecoordination mechanisms are not perfect and have not formed a cohesive force;the supervision and security system for both peacetime and wartime is notstrongly balanced; the information publication lays more emphasis on the formsinstead of contents; the weight in assessment and supervision system needs to beameliorated.In order to improve the information disclosure during emergency response,we may take into consideration the following proposals:to learn from thedeveloped countries’ experiences in government information disclosure;toenhance the decision-making awareness with the present domestic situation; tocomplete the publication and coordination system so as to form cohesive forcesin information publication;to perfect the supervision and security system so thatthe information disclosure during emergency response could be implemented inall aspects.