The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Communist Party's chief watchdog, is unifying its supervision of government departments and major state-owned enterprises, in an effort to ensure its inspectors are free from the influence of those under their supervision.

Based on experiments with the Ministry of Health, the State Food and Drug Administration and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce in 2002, the scheme has expanded this year to five other commissions and ministries, according to the latest issue of the Beijing-based "Outlook" weekly.

The five new departments under the scheme are: the State Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the Ministry of Land and Resources and the State Press and Publication Administration.

"The experiments have been going smoothly and we ultimately aim to cover all the central authorities' commissions and ministries and major SOEs," an official with the Discipline Commission said.

According to the existing decades-old practices, many of the discipline inspectors in ministries and commissions are under the leadership of, or even on the payroll of, the department they supervise. Analysts say this situation has created complications in the relations between the watchdogs and their targets.

"Unification of all the watchdog's subsidiaries and managerial separation between the inspectors and their working target will ensure inspectors better fulfill their duties and curb corruption inside the Party," the report said.

Under the new trial mechanism, the party discipline inspectors sent by CPC's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to government organs will directly report to the commission and follow its orders, instead of the prior reporting to both the watchdog and the institutions under inspection.

The commission will have the exclusive power to check and decide the working merits of all its branches instead of sharing the power with government organs, so as to effectively enhance the commission’s control over the agencies, according to the watchdog.

Such a bid will help the inspectors avoid the influence of the ministries or commissions they are responsible for, analysts said.

Though the trial has so far been smooth and fruitful, the commission admitted it suffers a lack of prior practices or experiences to draw help or lessons from and has to be cautious enough, given the political, policy and professional nature of the reform.

The right method should be to "try, check and improve", it said.

Though the other more than forty agencies of the commission not under the trial will for now remain under the dual leadership, the new management system will finally spread to all the commission's more than 50 agencies in ministries, commissions, organizations and institutions connected to the State Council and some state enterprises, according to the watchdog.

(Xinhua News Agency September 5, 2003)