Posted on behalf of Hepeng Jia

Facing strong public pressure for fiscal transparency, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has become the first government ministry to reveal in detail how it plans to spend its budget.

Chinese ministries and local governments began to publish their budgets last year, but their operational budgets – including officials’ spending on travel and accommodation – was lumped in to a catch-all category of ‘other spending’. Critics have suggested that failing to detail how the money is spent could be used to cover up corruption.

MOST’s budget appeared on its website on 14 April. Its annual spend for 2011 is set to reach 24.69 billion yuan (US$3.8 billion), including 24.1 billion yuan on science and technology research funding. It will also spend 273 million yuan (US$42 million) on resource exploitation, 91.5 million yuan (US$14.1 million) on ‘diplomatic affairs’ and 21.1 million (US$3.2 million) on creating jobs.

It also plans to spend 40 million yuan (US$6.2 million) on international travel, car purchase and business accommodation for its staff.

MOST’s S&T funding has risen 14.08 per cent compared with last year. The total S&T budget of the central government is 194.4 billion yuan (US$29.9 billion) in 2011, which will be shared by the National Natural Science Foundation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and various ministries.

As the first ministry to clearly show its expenditure, MOST has been widely praised by media and experts – a rare event, since the ministry’s allocation of science funding has been widely questioned.

“MOST has set a good example to other ministries,” said Han Baojiang, a professor at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, when interviewed by China National Radio.

Correction: The article stated that MOST’s resource exploitation budget was 2.7 billion yuan. This has now been corrected (to 273 million yuan).