The Communist Party of China (CPC) has renewed efforts to strengthen
supervision over the personal conduct of leading officials to curb corruption
and build a clean government.
The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee yesterday called for
stricter internal supervision within the Party by better implementing the
decade-old Regulations on Reporting Major Personal Matters by Leading Officials.
The move follows a recent spate of corruption cases involving high-ranking
officials such as Li Baojin, chief prosecutor of Tianjin, and Zhu Junyi,
director of the Shanghai Municipal Labour and Social Security Bureau.
Both are under investigation for accepting a large amount of bribes, with Li
accused of receiving favours from the property sector for his mistress.
At a meeting presided by CPC Central Committee General Secretary Hu Jintao,
the Political Bureau said the regulations "are important measures to strengthen
supervision over leading Party officials and ensure clean and honest
government."
"All localities and departments should amend and improve the regulations...
and leading Party officials at all levels should strictly implement the
regulations," Xinhua News Agency quoted the meeting as saying.
Party discipline and personnel departments should consider leading officials'
performance in implementing the regulations as one of the main criteria in their
assessment, it added.
Promulgated on January 31, 1997, the regulations were branded as a "sunshine"
policy to fight corruption by placing under Party scrutiny all major economic
activities of leading Party officials.
The regulations target leading officials in the Party's organs, people's
congresses, governments, political advisory organs and judicial departmens at
county level or above, as well as cadres whose rank is equivalent to county head
or above in State-owned enterprises and companies.
Together with rules such as the Code of Ethical Conduct of Senior Officials,
the regulations are aimed at imposing a code of conduct for leading officials.
According to the regulations, leading officials are required to report to the
Party within a month if they or their immediate family members build, buy, rent
or sell property, marry foreigners, or travel abroad for private reasons.
Under the rules, they must inform higher-ups if their spouses or children are
under judicial investigation, if they move abroad or if they run businesses or
hold high-ranking positions in joint ventures or mainland branches of overseas
companies.
Professor Ren Jianming of the Clean Government Research Office at Tsinghua
University said the top Party leaders' new emphasis on the regulations suggests
that they had not been well implemented.
"Most corrupt officials were found to have abused their power in exchange of
personal gains for their spouses and children," he said.
"If we fail to learn a lesson from the past and continue to do a bad job of
supervising leading officials, more of them may fall victim to corruption."
(China Daily 08/30/2006 page1)
