Addressing a recent training session for government supervisors and Communist Party of China discipline inspectors, Wu Guanzheng, secretary of the CPC's Central Discipline Inspection Commission, vowed to have corrupt officials find their political careers ruined, their family fortunes lost, and that it is too late to repent.

That is the harshest language we have ever heard from the nation's top corruption buster.

If such resolve is implemented faithfully in handling corruption cases, it surely would constitute the kind of deterrence Wu envisaged.

He urged official government supervisors and Party inspectors to dig deeper to ferret out corrupt elements and apply greater pressure upon them. He even cited the approach of Hua Tuo, a legendary Chinese doctor known to have scraped the patient's bones to cure an infection, to illustrate the need for a drastic antidote to corruption.

Wu's words belie the national leadership's eagerness to get rid of an annoying thorn in its side: corruption scandals have turned out to be a damaging threat to the Party's and government's images and credibility, seriously eroding public confidence.

Party and government officials' easy access to public resources plus the lack of oversight in the disposal of such resources has resulted in rent-seeking by public servants.

To be fair to the authorities, they have said and done a lot about corruption. Never before have we heard of so many corrupt officials uncovered and dealt with. Never before has anti-corruption as a policy initiative commanded such prominence in official rhetoric.

But perhaps because many corruption scandals ended up failing to meet the angry public's anticipation of severe punishments, there is the popular impression that corrupt officials have more or less received lenient treatment.

Wu's pledge is a positive resonance of the calls for harsh penalties to make unruly public officials in awe of the law. Raising the cost of a certain offence has the potential to boost the law's validity and deterrence. Not to mention that "punish one and deter a hundred" is a time-honored formula in the nation's judicial tradition.

Corrupt officials are not qualified for public service. Illegally obtained public wealth must be taken back. And it is good to cultivate in public servants the feeling that it is too costly to engage in corruption.

But a more imperative need in our law enforcement is to make sure that all who violate the law are brought to justice, and that every violator gets the penalty he or she deserves.

That is to say, we should first make our judiciary blind to the identity of the violator.

Be he or she an ordinary citizen or high official, he or she cannot anticipate differential treatment just because of who he or she is.

(China Daily September 19, 2006)