On January 22, a public hearing took place on whether mobile
phone carriers should lower their roaming fees when users travel
out of their home cities.
Public hearings have become a common part of the decision-making
process for administrators in recent years, especially on issues
closely involving common people's lives, such as the prices of
daily necessities.
However, most of these hearings have been branded rubber stamps
to justify various price rises. One of these reasons is that some
of the people who attend them have been invited to appear at almost
all local hearings, without offering valuable and pertinent
suggestions.
This definitely hurts the credibility of public hearings, making
them substance-less showcases.
Public hearings should be an occasion for administrative bodies
or legislatures to consult the public before making important
decisions or to collect public responses to important policy moves
after they have been in effect for a while.
They help amass the information decision-makers need, thereby
improving policies or yielding necessary revisions according to the
public need.
So hearings should be viewed as a channel for the authorities to
listen directly to the voice of the public, just as they conduct
surveys through administrative branches or browse media
reports.
Public hearings are part of both the legislative process and the
system for setting administrative policy. And they could play an
important role in channeling the views of common people.
However, the decision-making is much more than the public
hearings.
By law, it is acceptable for the authorities to host a hearing
before or after they stage a policy move. Hearings can be used to
relay information to the authorities for their reference when they
want to launch a policy, carry out a stipulation or revise an
existing rule.
In other words, administrative bodies should not base their
policies solely upon the suggestions of individual representatives
participating in public hearings. Instead, they should fix their
policies according to the needs of the country and the law, while
taking the public's opinion into account as a reference.
The role of the public hearing should not be stressed
disproportionately, or we will see misunderstandings among
participants and decision-makers.
Rather than examining decisions tabled after such hearings, the
standard for judging whether a public hearing has done its job
should be whether the hearing improved the transparency of an
administrative body and safeguarded the public's right to know.
The key to enhancing the credibility of public hearings lies in
turning the hearing into an opportunity for businesses, consumers
and regulators to fully express themselves and a forum for erasing
conflicts dividing interested parties.
If public hearings are manipulated to the advantage of certain
groups, or if participants are hushed, people will continue to
doubt their credibility, even if the authorities decide to lower
the price of a commodity, in accordance with the purpose of the
hearing.
Most of the misunderstandings and suspicion about public
hearings stem from a lack of knowledge about their role.
Besides providing an occasion for communication, public hearings
are also significant in the context of administrative law: They
boost the transparency of the government.
This part of public hearings is rarely acknowledged by common
people, leaving them to evaluate the efficiency of a hearing
according to the decision made afterwards.
But once people understand this, they are likely to show their
understanding as long as the authorities are sincere in listening
to the people involved and make their decisions in a transparent
manner.
Therefore, several substantial steps should be taken to improve
the credibility of public hearings.
Special laws and regulations should be put in place to regulate
them.
Specific clauses should be put in place to define procedures,
the qualifications of participants and their rights and
obligations.
Public hearings should be treated as a solemn forum for
expressing, debating, finding conflicts and striking consensuses if
possible.
The public should be able to hear about participants'
suggestions and the record should be open for public reference.
A scheme should be established to select qualified individuals
to serve as public representatives to public hearings so that
citizens with appropriate professional knowledge can fulfill their
wish of serving the public by attending hearings and looking after
the public good.
The author is a professor at Zhongnan University of Economics
and Law and one of the representatives attending the public hearing
on mobile phone roaming fees on January 22. The article was
originally published in People's Daily
(China Daily February 18, 2008)