Government budget goes public online in Guangzhou.

Government budget goes public online in Guangzhou.

According to Chinadigitaltimes.com:

For the first time, the Guangzhou government made public their official budget for 114 different city-level departments and agencies. The domestic news report is here. According to Netease.com, all contents were presented as graphics in a massive 2.08 Gigabyte file, which takes several hours to download.

However, some netizens did take the time to download the file, and reported on what they found. Here are some sample numbers excerpted from the Public Security Bureau budget:

* Public Security Bureau Kindergarten (机关幼儿园): RMB 11,993, 000
* Domestic security and protection (国内安全保卫) [a department set up to deal with political dissidents]: RMB 8,200,000
* Internet investigation and management (网络侦控管理): RMB 6,000,000
* Anti-terrorism (反恐怖): RMB 800,000

Each department on the report has significant amounts of money budgeted to “Other Expenses.” In the Subway Bureau Budget, “Other Expenses” is RMB 23,387,900, or one-third of the total budget.

According to sina.com.cn, in less than half a day after the budget was put online, around 40,000 people have visited the website. Because of the high volume, the website went down for the rest of that day. This phenomena shows that tax payers in China do care about how the government is going to spend their money, although the government has been keeping budgeting information as private.

But today when I checked the website where the budget was published, I found nothing on the website except a blank webpage titled as Budgeting.

Is the show already over?