Online rankings to help local authorities
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People.com.cn on Monday unveiled a ranked list of China's local authorities' ability to deal with public sentiment during the first quarter of this year, in a bid to urge local governments to better handle public concerns.
The Baimiao township government in Bazhong city of Sichuan province, nicknamed by netizens "naked township government", tops the list as a good model for posting its entire financial budget online.
The Shanxi vaccine scandal stays at the bottom of the list and gets a red alert as local authorities failed to calm public concerns as they focused more on pledges to investigate rather than on details of the problem.
With the development of the Internet and the huge number of 384 million netizens, China's authorities are paying more attention to public concerns on the Internet in their decision-making. Officials are also becoming more interactive with the public.
The publication of the quarterly ranking list is expected to give local authorities good models of dealing with public concerns as well as alerts to those that failed to handle public sentiment properly and finally to help local governments improve their governance capability.
