Authorities target county-level top officials

Global Times, February 17, 2011

"In most cases, it is the county-level Party secretaries themselves who take supervisory roles and check on their own work. That is why the existing supervision system has failed to work on them," said Zhu Lijia, a professor of public governance at the National School of Administration in Beijing, to the Global Times.

There are more than 2,400 county-level Party secretaries in the country, China Comment, a magazine under the Xinhua News Agency, reported earlier.

The country has implemented pilot programs aimed at restricting county-level Party secretaries' power in some provinces, such as Zhejiang and Hebei, People's Daily reported.

"Collective leadership, under which every member of the standing committee of the CPC county committee has a say in decision making, has proved to work well," Lin said. "Party members voting and nominating chief officials could become a down-to-top reform starting from county-level."

A poll carried out by the People's Daily Tuesday said 80 percent of the public still found the punishments handed out to corrupt officials too lenient.

"China should have zero tolerance toward corruption," Zhu said.