Xinxin Yang, or Amy as she is known to faculty and friends here at Indiana University, is a research assistant this semester for updates to this blog.
We are lucky! Here is her first summary data from work she has done so far:
1.Rarely does a researcher find any English articles about public notice, especially scholar journal articles talking about the public notice in general, in China.
2. By using baidu.com, the Chinese search engine, as google.com in the U.S., she searched “Gong Gao” (公告), which is the directly translation of public notice. Chinese public concern is more on the government public notice than other kinds of public notice, such as commercial and personal, if there is any. E-government is also heavily pushed by central government.
3. Mainland China has had for a long time had restrictions of government published information. The people’s Republic of China Government Information Disclosure Bill (acted from Jan 1, 2008) is the first regulation to ask the government public their information.
4. Government public notices involve all fields– education, transportation, culture, politics and economics. This might has its root from the centralized governmental power.
5. Based on the CNNIC data (December 31, 2013) , there are 618 million internet users and 500 million mobile internet users. Almost half of the Chinese population are internet users.
6. Commercial websites rarely have a public notice category, even for some famous China based international brand, such as Lenovo and Haier. One interesting thing is, Haier U.S. has public notices on its website, but does not have one on its Chinese website. Chinese businesses have not pay enough attention to public notice, even China joined in WTO for so many years, though it is too premature in coming to this conclusion.
Here is a link to a China Central Government Public Notice of what she reports.
The Public Eye 