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)
