A tougher and more systematic crackdown on corruption was promised
by Chinese President
Hu Jintao in a keynote speech delivered at a
Party conference on Tuesday.
Hu, who is also General Secretary of the Central Committee of
the Communist Party of China (CPC), made the call
at the Seventh Plenary Session of the CPC Central Commission for
Discipline Inspection (CCDI). This is a three-day meeting that
started Monday.
Acknowledging the progress the commission had made in the past
year, Hu said the Party still faced an "arduous fight against
corruption."
Hu told senior Party officials and the 110 CCDI members
attending the session that they should continue to work on
investigating "major and high-level corruption cases" and sternly
punish crooked officials.
China's anti-graft fight last year led to the downfall of
several senior officials including Shanghai ex-Party chief Chen
Liangyu, former Beijing Vice Mayor Liu Zhihua and former top
statistician Qiu Xiaohua.
Chen was China's highest ranking official to fall in a
corruption scandal in a decade. The latest high-level official to
be investigated for graft is Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of China's
drug administration. He was said to be implicated in a string of
bribery cases before he left the post in June 2005.
Hu called on government officials and Party leaders at all
levels to establish a comprehensive system to expose and punish
corrupt officials and to make anti-graft efforts an integral part
of the country's economic, political and cultural development.
In his speech, the president ordered local officials to
"solemnly carry out the central government's policy and ensure its
absolute authority." Hu acknowledged that some of the leadership's
strictures were ignored by headstrong local officials.
Hu repeated his call to Party leaders to "improve their work
style" which is a Chinese expression meaning that cadres should be
upright, modest and prudent, hard-working, frugal and care more
about the people they are responsible for than themselves.
"We must realize how essential it is to improve cadres' work
style. This is a key challenge for the Communist Party," Hu
said.
He said the CPC must make stringent efforts to improve the
education, supervision and self-discipline of leading cadres.
Ethics was a top priority in this.
Before the CCDI's three-day meeting the commission reported its
progress on dealing with commercial bribery. This usually refers to
bribes offered by companies to government officials in exchange for
special favors.
A total of 3,128 cases directly involving government employees
and a sum of money totaling 968 million yuan (US$121 million) were
uncovered in the period August 2005 to June 2006, the commission
said.
In order to prevent corruption from staining China's
preparations for the 2008 Olympics, Li Jinhua, the head of the
National Audit Office, said Monday that Olympic spending will be a
key target for his department's work in 2007.
Former deputy mayor of Beijing, Liu Zhihua, who was in charge of
the Olympic construction projects, was fired last year for alleged
corruption.
Li said his staff will audit major investment projects and
seriously investigate any bribery cases.
(Xinhua News Agency January 10, 2007)