Preemptive means

China has taken a variety of measures to deal with the problems.

One method is regulation. China issued a regulation on income declaration by above-county-level leading officials as early as in 1995, and has updated them three times. The punishment for false declaration has become increasingly severe, from circulating a notice of criticism on the involved officials in the 1997 regulation to reassigning the officials' post or even removing them from office in the 2010 regulation.

Another measure is registration and screening. China started a nationwide registration of all public officials in 2011, requiring them to submit reports on personal matters. If their spouses and children have emigrated, officials are required to hand in another form about their overseas family members, including their ID numbers and certificates, reasons for emigrating, sources of expenses, overseas addresses, and overseas working status quo.

As money transfer is essential for naked officials, monitoring financial institutions is also important. The state-run China Anti-Money Laundering Monitoring & Analysis Center is said to have legally collected information on suspect capital transactions from various-level Chinese banks and other financial institutions, and China's Central Bank has joined forces with related departments, to improve information sharing.

Besides inter-department efforts, cooperation with the international community is also well under way. Since different nations have different judicial systems, it is often difficult to bring runaway officials back to China. But significant progress has been made since China entered into the United Nations Convention against Corruption in 2006. China has signed civil and criminal judicial cooperation agreements with 49 nations, extradition treaties with 36 nations, and bilateral cooperation agreements or memorandums with 75 nations.

The most effective means, however, would perhaps be a national anti-corruption law which has been anticipated for years.