Anti-graft move expected at China’s key party meeting
All eyes on whether CCP will enact law to shed light on cadres’ assets
By Grace Ng 12 September 2009
BEIJING: A breakthrough in China’s long-drawn battle against corruption may emerge at a key meeting of the country’s political leaders next week.
Analysts expect President Hu Jintao to announce new measures to fight graft among officials, at the Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 17th Central Committee, an annual meeting of about 300 party elites to discuss major policies.
The anticipated anti-graft measures include an unprecedented and long-awaited move to shed light on cadres’ personal assets.
This so-called ‘Sunshine Policy’ - which will require all officials to disclose their personal assets as well as that of their close relatives - is key to Beijing’s efforts to curb corruption, a top item on the upcoming session’s agenda.
State news agency Xinhua’s Outlook magazine alluded to this in an article on July 27: ‘Our society hopes very much that the party is able to use all means to get rid of corruption and degradation, including measures requiring officials to disclose their personal assets.
‘There is reason to believe that the Fourth Plenum will meet society’s expectations to come up with new measures.’
This statement was followed by a July article by the Study Times, run by the Central Party School of the CCP, calling for officials who refuse to declare their financial assets to quit their posts.
Fighting corruption is a topic ‘very close to the people’s hearts and interests’, noted political commentator Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology.
China is rocked every year by tens of thousands of protests, many sparked by corrupt officials’ abuse of power in a myriad of ways - from demanding bribes and siphoning off money from official coffers, to snatching people’s land and being involved in cases of rape and violence.
The social instability these demonstrations have caused has heightened fears in the CCP that its rot within may become its undoing.
Sceptical analysts note that the CCP had waged a countrywide anti-graft campaign since 1998 to little effect.
For the past six years, some 50,000 officials have been convicted of corruption annually.
The average size of bribes swelled from 2.53 million yuan (S$526,000) in 2007 to 8.84 million yuan last year, according to the Supreme People’s Court.
Over the past year, at least one high-ranking cadre has been arrested every month for ‘economic crimes’ and abetting felonies. Those implicated include former Shenzhen mayor Xu Zongheng and oil giant Sinopec’s former chairman Chen Tonghai.
The latest case involved the top official of China’s civilian and military nuclear power programmes, Kang Rixin. It was reported last month that he was being investigated for ‘grave violations of discipline’, a phrase often used in corruption inquiries.
While corruption charges at the very top are often seen as politically motivated means to remove rivals, there is little doubt the party knows it needs to clean up its act.
The hope is that the coming meeting will do what previous sessions did not - create a mechanism that actually works.
There have been other anti-graft measures suggested in the past few months. In a new book titled Anti-corruption Report, China’s former top judge Xiao Yang, 71, proposed a unified state-level anti-corruption organ. He believes corruption has proliferated in China precisely because there is a lack of supervision.
Other analysts hope that the plenum will endorse an increase in the number of anti-corruption officials. Now, provincial-level procuratorates usually have only three to four such officials handling an average of 30,000 official corruption cases a year, according to the Chinese law paper, the Legal Times.
But the most closely watched reform at the meeting will be the so-called Sunshine Policy, which had been mooted repeatedly over the past 20 years but was never passed, as columnist Chen Weihua noted in the state English newspaper China Daily earlier this month.
There is ‘intense opposition to such a law from many public officials’, he wrote.
The ultimate test, said Hong Kong-based Dr Willy Lam who wrote a recent commentary on this issue for American magazine China Brief, is whether Mr. Hu will really bite the bullet this time and deal with the rot at its very core - even if ‘it means having to expose the misdeeds of the highest-level cadres’.
2 comments:
Anti-graft move expected at China’s key party meeting
All eyes on whether CCP will enact law to shed light on cadres’ assets
By Grace Ng
12 September 2009
BEIJING: A breakthrough in China’s long-drawn battle against corruption may emerge at a key meeting of the country’s political leaders next week.
Analysts expect President Hu Jintao to announce new measures to fight graft among officials, at the Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 17th Central Committee, an annual meeting of about 300 party elites to discuss major policies.
The anticipated anti-graft measures include an unprecedented and long-awaited move to shed light on cadres’ personal assets.
This so-called ‘Sunshine Policy’ - which will require all officials to disclose their personal assets as well as that of their close relatives - is key to Beijing’s efforts to curb corruption, a top item on the upcoming session’s agenda.
State news agency Xinhua’s Outlook magazine alluded to this in an article on July 27: ‘Our society hopes very much that the party is able to use all means to get rid of corruption and degradation, including measures requiring officials to disclose their personal assets.
‘There is reason to believe that the Fourth Plenum will meet society’s expectations to come up with new measures.’
This statement was followed by a July article by the Study Times, run by the Central Party School of the CCP, calling for officials who refuse to declare their financial assets to quit their posts.
Fighting corruption is a topic ‘very close to the people’s hearts and interests’, noted political commentator Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology.
China is rocked every year by tens of thousands of protests, many sparked by corrupt officials’ abuse of power in a myriad of ways - from demanding bribes and siphoning off money from official coffers, to snatching people’s land and being involved in cases of rape and violence.
The social instability these demonstrations have caused has heightened fears in the CCP that its rot within may become its undoing.
Sceptical analysts note that the CCP had waged a countrywide anti-graft campaign since 1998 to little effect.
For the past six years, some 50,000 officials have been convicted of corruption annually.
The average size of bribes swelled from 2.53 million yuan (S$526,000) in 2007 to 8.84 million yuan last year, according to the Supreme People’s Court.
Over the past year, at least one high-ranking cadre has been arrested every month for ‘economic crimes’ and abetting felonies. Those implicated include former Shenzhen mayor Xu Zongheng and oil giant Sinopec’s former chairman Chen Tonghai.
The latest case involved the top official of China’s civilian and military nuclear power programmes, Kang Rixin. It was reported last month that he was being investigated for ‘grave violations of discipline’, a phrase often used in corruption inquiries.
While corruption charges at the very top are often seen as politically motivated means to remove rivals, there is little doubt the party knows it needs to clean up its act.
The hope is that the coming meeting will do what previous sessions did not - create a mechanism that actually works.
There have been other anti-graft measures suggested in the past few months. In a new book titled Anti-corruption Report, China’s former top judge Xiao Yang, 71, proposed a unified state-level anti-corruption organ. He believes corruption has proliferated in China precisely because there is a lack of supervision.
Other analysts hope that the plenum will endorse an increase in the number of anti-corruption officials. Now, provincial-level procuratorates usually have only three to four such officials handling an average of 30,000 official corruption cases a year, according to the Chinese law paper, the Legal Times.
But the most closely watched reform at the meeting will be the so-called Sunshine Policy, which had been mooted repeatedly over the past 20 years but was never passed, as columnist Chen Weihua noted in the state English newspaper China Daily earlier this month.
There is ‘intense opposition to such a law from many public officials’, he wrote.
The ultimate test, said Hong Kong-based Dr Willy Lam who wrote a recent commentary on this issue for American magazine China Brief, is whether Mr. Hu will really bite the bullet this time and deal with the rot at its very core - even if ‘it means having to expose the misdeeds of the highest-level cadres’.
Post a Comment