Study On Press Spokesman System In Government From The Perspective Of Transparent Government

According to the social contract theory by Rousseau, government transparency is an inevitable trend of social progress since it is the state's obligation, embodying state's protection for citizen's right to know. With the development of social economy, citizens have increasing awareness of their right with more desire for participation and supervision on government management, demanding government to change its original single management mode to bilateral communicative mode between government and citizens with information disclosure instead of information encapsulation. Government should serve citizens rather than manage citizens so as to satisfy citizen's demand and to shape a sound government imagePress spokesman system in government is the important guarantee for establishing transparent government as an important component. Some developed western countries have explored and established their government press spokesman system for nearly one hundred years since the early 20th century, thus their system has been relatively mature either for theoretical research or practical employment. While although we have had foreign press release since the early establishment of new China, the main purpose of press release during this period was to publicize ideology and spread foreign policy without a standard and systematic press spokesman system. The system was not formally established until April 23th,1983, but for a long time the system still adhered to the concept of "focus on ourselves with more publicity". Its turning point was the emergence of "SARS" event in 2003. Citizens attached great importance to public information with more desire for rights to know, and government was under great pressure due to public opinions. Since then, government press spokesman system has emphasized on providing public information service and government transparency instead of foreign publicity. The incident also triggered many local government press spokesman systems. At present, we have widely established a three-level system of government press spokesman from state council to ministries and commissions to local governments at all levels.In China, press spokesman system in government has been rapidly developed in these years, but its development is passively perfected under social environment from inward to great extent due to the late start, resulting in many problems, such as undefined position of government press spokesman, unclear press content, and nonstandard news release procedure, etc.Based on the realistic demand for constructing transparent government, the paper reflects on how to perfect government press spokesman system from the perspective of transparent government. The paper analyzes the establishment and development of government press spokesman system in our country and exploring problems and reasons in our system. Also it gives deep analysis on press spokesman system in America and Britain, which first established the system, as well as Hongkong. Thus it concludes some experience and enlightenment for our system from their practice and proposes some perfect countermeasures combining our own conditions to benefit construction of our government press spokesman system as well as transparent government.