Party's efforts to combat corruption achieve overwhelming success, says senior official

The Communist Party of China has had overwhelming success cracking down on corruption over the past 10 years, a senior anti-graft official said on Monday.

The Party has taken comprehensive steps to ensure officials do not have the audacity, opportunity or desire to be corrupt, has come down hard on corruption involving both political and economic elements, and has resolutely punished officials whose misconduct directly affected the public, said Xiao Pei, deputy head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC Central Committee, China's top anti-graft watchdog, at a news conference on the sidelines of the ongoing 20th CPC National Congress.

Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, discipline inspection and supervisory organs nationwide have filed more than 4.6 million cases of corruption.

Among those put under investigation, 553 were senior officials under the management of the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee. More than 25,000 department-level officials and some 182,000 county-level officials were punished, according to Xiao.

Over the past decade, the CPC Central Committee has incorporated full and rigorous self-governance into its strategic layout, fundamentally addressing the problem of lax and weak self-governance in Party organizations at the root, he said.

Xiao said the Party kicked off efforts to achieve full and rigorous self-governance shortly after the 18th CPC Congress by formulating and implementing the central Party leadership's eight-point decision on improving conduct. The CPC has worked ceaselessly to improve the behavior of its members and enforce Party discipline since then.

"Thanks to these efforts, unhealthy tendencies that had long gone unchecked have been reversed, and deep-seated problems that had plagued us for years have been remedied," he said.

"We will uphold the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, improve the Party's system of self-reform, take strict steps to improve Party conduct and enforce Party discipline and win the tough and protracted battle against corruption," he said.