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The legislative efforts by various departments and local governments, while specifying hearing procedure in particular regulatory contexts, have also resulted in some serious problems, among which the most notable one is the lack of uniformity. Conflicts between central rules and local rules and conflicts among different local areas with respect to procedural requirements of public hearing have proved to be very a serious problem, increasing the situation of "fragmentation" of law enforcement.[3]
B. Hearing in rate-setting/price-fixing process
Although the Price Law of 1997 requires that in setting price or rates for public facilities or monopolized products or services, public hearing shall be conducted by relevant agency to solicit public opinions, it says nothing about how should a hearing be proceeded. In this sense, the system of public hearing remains inspirational rather than institutional. This has caused the consequence that most hearing experiments in price-fixing context were very frustrating. The hearing jointly organized by State Committee on Planning and Development and the Ministry of Information Industry to set rate for telecommunication is a good example. On September 15, 2000, the SCPD and Ministry of Information Industry held a "public hearing" to determine more “reasonable” rates for local and long distance calls, in which government officials, legal experts and economists, and representatives from China Telecom participated. This hearing was not made public, and there are no customer representative permitted to participate. Later interviews with participants and disclosure of the record of the hearing revealed that opinions and arguments of experts had not been considered at all in making final decision. And no reasons were given for rejection to such arguments. No wonder that hearing of this kind has been criticized as a “beautiful flower vase”, implying that the procedural requirement of hearing is basically symbolic and useless except for decoration.
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