HONG KONG -- Last month, in a small but significant move toward greater openness and transparency, China for the first time made available to the public a portion of materials from its diplomatic archives for the period between the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and 1955.
According to the Archives Law, passed in 1987, government files should be opened after 30 years. It apparently took the Foreign Ministry 16 years to organize its files and decide which ones to make available first. The roughly 3,000 files that have been made available account for about 30 percent of the 10,000 diplomatic files for the six-year period, or only 1 percent of the total of 330,000 files in the archives.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman explained that although 3,000 "may not be a lot, it is an important and positive first step." The aim of opening up, he said, "is to enable the Chinese people and the international community to understand fully China's diplomatic history and the efforts that it has made in safeguarding world peace and stability and promoting common development."