Beijing, Sept. 12 (Reuters): China will no longer regard the death toll in natural disasters as a state secret, the official Xinhua news agency said today, presenting the step as part of government efforts to improve transparency.

It gave no indication whether China would start retroactively revising death tolls from such disasters, for instance a famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Communist Party refers to as “three years of natural disasters”.

The famine claimed an estimated 30 million lives and has been blamed by many on Mao Zedong’s 1958 Great Leap Forward in which he urged farmers to abandon their fields and make steel in backyard furnaces as part of a drive to overtake Britain economically and catch up with the US.

China “declassified” the death toll from natural disasters last month, Xinhua said.

“Declassification of these figures and materials is conducive to boosting our disaster prevention and relief work,” Xinhua quoted Shen Yongshe, spokesman of the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, as saying.

China announces death tolls from natural disasters such as typhoons and earthquakes through official channels such as Xinhua or government agencies. Unauthorised attempts to obtain such figures can lead to lengthy jail terms for stealing or leaking state secrets.

The decision marks a major step taken by the government towards “ruling according to law” and “building a transparent government”, Shen told the news conference held by the administration and the ministry of civil affairs.

“To continue to see natural disaster death tolls as state secrets makes it difficult to adapt to practical needs of the development of our disaster relief work and is not in accordance with general practices of the international community,” Xinhua said in a separate commentary.

Foreign journalists were not invited to the news conference, underscoring the political sensitivity of the issue.

China broadly defines as a state secret anything that affects the security and interests of the state, but the limits are vague. Rights groups say the laws are arbitrary enough to be manipulated for political purposes.

“I think it (the policy) suits the process of opening up, but Chinese authorities stress the need to do it step by step. We hope it can be faster, but if it is moving forward, it is good,” said Zhan Jiang, dean of journalism at China Youth University for Political Sciences.