Graft fight crucial to road map

Improving officials' work style seen as key to smooth start of Five-Year Plan

The annual meeting of China's top disciplinary watchdog showed that fighting corruption and improving officials' work style will continue this year to ensure the smooth start of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), experts and officials said.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, stressed the significance of enhancing the Party's ability to purify, improve and reform itself so that it can guide and ensure that the journey of socialism with Chinese characteristics moves forward steadily.

Xi made the remark at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which was held from Friday to Sunday in Beijing.

"Corruption remains the largest risk threatening the Party's governance," Xi said. Political and economic issues are becoming intertwined, he said, posing threats to the political security of both the Party and the nation. Traditional and new types of corruption are also mixed together, and corrupt behaviors are becoming more elusive and complicated, he said.

Jiang Laiyong, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Xi's remarks illustrate the complexity and harmfulness of corruption and the arduous and systematic nature of the fight against corruption.

"This has once again sounded the alarm to the whole Party that there is no alternative to fighting corruption and that the Party must rise above difficulties."

Efforts should be made to push forward the anti-graft fight and ensure that officials "don't dare to, are unable to and have no desire to commit acts of corruption", according to the communique adopted by the top disciplinary body on Sunday.

"The anti-graft fight should be combined with preventing misconduct from taking place so as to strengthen deterrence against corruption and increase people's awareness that they should not become corrupt," Jiang said.