The Seventh Plenary Session of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Communist Party's top disciplinary watchdog, held in Beijing on January 8 drew special attention in the country as it set up a plan for 2007 based on reviewing the anti-corruption work in 2006, which witnessed several cases of corruption by major government officials.

Last September, a report by the official Xinhua News Agency shocked the nation: Chen Liangyu, Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), was sacked for his involvement in a social security fund scandal. Chen is the third highest ranking official to have been brought down in the last 20 years in China.

The scandal is still under investigation. According to the preliminary results, however, the case involved over 50 officials in the political and business communities, including the former head of the National Bureau of Statistics, who had only been in office for seven months. While disclosing no details, Gan Yisheng, the spokesman of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said the Chen case is more serious than estimated at the beginning.

Another 10 provincial and ministerial-level officials were stripped of their positions under the anti-corruption drive around the time of the Chen case. Among them, Wang Shouye, former Deputy Commander of the Navy of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), was sentenced to life in prison for embezzlement, becoming the highest ranking officer in the PLA to be convicted of a crime.

"Cracking down on these major corruption cases in 2006 demonstrates our Party's solid resolution to strengthen discipline and combat corruption," said Gan, who emphasized that corrupt officials will be dealt with severely regardless of the position they hold.

President Hu Jintao also appeared at the January plenary session, calling for a sustained fight against corruption.

Wu Guanzheng, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and also Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has taken a particularly tough attitude toward corruption. He said in a previous meeting that China will maintain high pressure on corruption.

These measures signal that China's anti-corruption work may move in a new direction or achieve a bigger breakthrough.

"The intensifying anti-corruption punch reflects the fact that the top administration is coming to an awareness of the crisis and has reached a consensus on combating corruption," Wang Guixiu, a professor in the CPC's Central Party School, told Beijing Review.

Corruption increase

According to the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released by the Berlin-based organization Transparency International, China's score jumped from 2.16 in 1995 to 3.3 in 2006, showing the biggest improvement among the world's countries. The range is from 10 (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt).

"This progress is attributed to China's continuous hard work against corruption," said Liao Ran, Asia-Pacific Regional Program Manager of Transparency International, an international nongovernmental organization addressing corruption.

Nevertheless, the results indicate a lot of room for improvement.

Statistics from the Supreme People's Procuratorate show that between January 2003 and August 2006, a total of 67,505 corrupt officials were rooted out, meaning that an average of almost 1,600 officials were put in prison every month. Central Commission for Discipline Inspection's figures show that China investigated 13,376 cases of official bribery between August 2005 and June 2006, or an average of some 40 cases a day, involving a total of 3.8 billion yuan.

The figures raise an issue: the harder corruption is fought, the more cases are revealed. One reason that the number of cases has not diminished as expected over the past 10 years, according to Liao, is that corruption is emerging in more areas where it has never been found before.

Before 1998, for example, government procurement was the area that witnessed rampant corruption, but since 1999, when the government took some effective countermeasures, corruption in this area has been controlled. However, new cases of corruption began to appear in the real estate and financial markets. Real estate corruption led to an annual loss of 10 billion yuan over the past 10 years as the industry has amassed significant capital, power and profits but lacks a sound supervision and management system. The majority of major corruption cases in 2006 were related to the real estate industry.

Some also relate the severe corruption situation to China's political and economic situation-in other words, they think that "developed countries have less corruption than developing ones" or that "democratic countries are cleaner than non-democratic ones."

But Liao holds that there is no necessary connection between corruption and a country's political system, and that corruption is mainly related to "opportunity." If there's an opportunity, officials will tend to take advantage of it, no matter whether in China or in Western countries.

China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy and from an agricultural society to an industrial one in reality has offered plenty of opportunities for corruption.

The recent corruption cases have three features, according to a publication by the Central Party School: they involve high-ranking officials, a huge sum of money and group corruption. The Chen case involved the embezzlement of 3.2 billion yuan. Li Shubiao, former head of the Housing Administration Center in Chenzhou City, Hunan Province, allegedly misappropriated 100 million yuan of housing funds; this case involved 158 people.

China's anti-corruption work has one feature: the intervention of the Central Government, said Shao Daosheng, a research fellow from the government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The Chen scandal is a case in point. The main actors in the case are high-ranking officials, and without the support of the higher powers, the case would not have been unearthed or thoroughly investigated. Shao noted that the resistance to the anti-corruption move comes mostly from local governments.

Political reform

The Central Government has developed a program that integrates "education, a system and supervision" to prevent and punish corruption. The discipline inspection departments for the first time have conceived an anti-corruption framework of clean politics and an anti-corruption legal system. The framework is to be primarily established by 2010 and further perfected by 2020.

Offering and taking bribes are two sides of the same coin. Judging from the increasing number of corruption cases, offering bribes is no less prevalent than receiving them, and bribery has infiltrated every corner of social life. But in reality, bribe takers have been put in jail while few of those who offer bribes have been punished, and thus they will continue to bribe.

There is a vivid metaphor to describe the situation: "It is like killing those who catch a cold while letting the viruses loose to infect healthy people."

Statistics show that the proportion of cases involving taking bribes to offering bribes is 100 to 7. On Transparency International's bribery index in 2002, China ranked second worst in terms of companies offering bribes. No doubt this is a big hurdle for China's anti-corruption efforts.

Starting on January 1, 2006, an Internet bribery blacklist was opened to the public. At present, the country's procuratorates at the intermediate level and above are putting information about all the bribe-offering cases since 1997 into a database in five categories: construction, finance, education, medicine and government procurement.

The name of the unit, its location and details of the case are included for corporate crimes. For individual cases, the contents include the person's name, ID number and case details. An individual's name can be automatically deleted from the database only after there is no record of offering bribes for five consecutive years.

The database is merely an information provider, a passive response, but its function should not be underestimated, especially in this information society.

A blacklisted company may be shut down and a person may have his reputation ruined, said Mo Yuchuan, a law professor at the Renmin University of China.

"Housing developers in Beicang District turn pale when the blacklist is mentioned; they are afraid of losing their business," said Wang Guomin, head of the Beicang People's Procuratorate in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.

The Central Government has directly appointed the chiefs of the local discipline inspection commissions in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, instead of being appointed by the local governments.

Public opinion holds that this is due to the occurrence of major corruption cases in these municipalities in 2006.

The Central Government is trying to get a firm hold on the appointment of provincial discipline inspection commission chiefs in order to impose its direct control on local anti-corruption work, the Hong Kong-based newspaper Wen Wei Po analyzed.

It has come to the Central Government's attention that the occurrence of many corruption cases is the result of the weakness and malfunctioning of the local anti-corruption bodies. Many believe that the massive reshuffling of personnel will inject more life into the anti-corruption efforts.

"It's too early to say something about the personnel reshuffle," said Wang Guixiu, the Central Party School professor. In his opinion, the root of fighting corruption lies in the system, instead of the mandate from top leaders and massive investigations. "Sending down a discipline inspection chief hardly makes any difference to the anti-corruption situation," said Wang, adding that deepening political reform and promoting intraparty democracy are a must for further anti-corruption progress; otherwise, twice the effort will yield half the results.

International cooperation

China has also expanded its international cooperation to combat corruption. Since September 1987, China has signed mutual legal assistance treaties with 49 countries and bilateral extradition treaties with nearly 30 countries.

China's Supreme People's Procuratorate has signed 83 bilateral cooperation agreements and memorandums of understanding with 75 foreign judicial and procuratorial bodies.

China's seeking help through international cooperation to root out corruption is a new trend, said Liao.

The UN Convention against Corruption, which is the most influential and comprehensive anti-corruption convention, took effect in China on February 12, 2006. It provides a legal framework for the international community to jointly crack down on corruption.

Last February, anti-corruption experts from the Sino-U.S. Joint Liaison Group (JLG) held a second meeting in Beijing and both sides made it clear that they will institutionalize the JLG mechanism and increase bilateral cooperation within the framework.

In April, the two sides jointly held an anti-corruption seminar under the auspices of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, where officials and experts from 18 international organizations and members of APEC touched upon the extradition of corrupt persons and the return of corrupt money.

That same month, the National People's Congress approved China's first bilateral extradition treaty with Spain. In October, the International Association of Anti-corruption Authorities announced its establishment with Jia Chunwang, head of China's Supreme People's Procuratorate, elected president of the organization.

In addition, publications are being compiled to follow up and study international anti-corruption efforts and to be used as reference materials for top officials to make decisions and policies.

"The deepening of international cooperation demonstrates China's resolution and faith in fighting against corruption and building clean politics," said Khalid Malik, United Nations Development Programme Resident Representative in China. n