Nine provincial or ministerial-level officials and 825 above the county level jailed for corruption, 23,733 cases of embezzlement, bribery and dereliction of duty probed and 97,260, or 0.14 percent, members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) faced disciplinary punishment. These are last year's results of the country's fight against corruption.

By any account, the figures released by the top judiciary bodies should make the anti-corruption drive seem impressive. But judiciary authorities and State leaders are not impressed. They say the drive is still arduous because sentencing and punishments are not an effective way to pre-empt crime.

What then is the remedy? New steps to prevent corruption at the root and keeping tabs on officials their behavior and lifestyle they say.

New focus

State leaders agree it's very important to keep up the fight against big crimes such as embezzlement, bribery and abuse of power. But they emphasize preventive steps to weed out ills like dereliction of duty, red tape, extravagance and wastage.

Dereliction of duty has caused severe loss, especially in accidents at workplaces, says Wang Zhenchuan, vice-procurator-general with the Supreme People's Procuratorate. For instance, about 50 government officials are under investigation for dereliction of duty that caused eight major accidents in coal mines last year.

Also, 20 officials in the 13 cases filed by the procuratorate were found guilty of dereliction of duty that led to disorder in the economy.

To end such recessive crimes, bureaus were set up in 25 provinces by January this year. A Jiangsu Provincial People's Procuratorate official, surnamed Sun, says these bureaus will join hands with their anti-corruption counterparts to form two effective tools to prevent and combat crimes committed by officials. Both types of bureaus are under the procuratorate.

Dozens of high-ranking officials have been involved in commercial bribery cases. According to official figures, China tackled 17,084 commercial corruption cases, involving 4.5 billion yuan ($580 million), from August 2005 to the end of last year. Government employees were directly involved in 3,912, or 23 percent, of those cases.

Though the data don't specify how many foreign firms were involved in such crimes, a Democracy and Law Times report in December said more than half of the commercial bribery cases in the past decade involved overseas firms.

Commercial bribery, like other forms of corruption, is a worry for even Premier Wen Jiabao, for he has declared that greater efforts would be made to break the nexus between officials and businesspersons, especially in construction projects, land leases, drug purchases and exploitation of natural resources.

Another ill plaguing the administration is the trend of building (or renovating) extravagant government offices exceeding standard norms, especially in provinces and regions that otherwise are backward. One glaring example is the government building at Bozhou in the not-so affluent East China's Anhui Province.

Not surprisingly, the per capita annual administrative expenditure has risen 24 times from 1986 to 2005, the rate of increase being higher than the country's par capita GDP.

To halt the trend, Wen has declared that departments that already have suitable offices would not be allowed to buy or build new structures or expand the existing ones. Also, a government office construction deemed a waste or inappropriate will be stopped or deferred immediately.

Another way to stop such unnecessary waste would be to limit governments' expenditures, which is exactly what the country's top auditing authority has proposed to do through a new regulation.

Red tape has been listed as part of the government's fight against corruption for the first time, with Premier Wen vowing to streamline the process of approving projects and issuing certificates.

Wang Xiongjun, a PhD scholar in government management at Peking University, says the long time needed for projects to get approval often prompts businesspeople to bribe officials or even junior government bodies to expedite the process. Red tape, inherited from the country's planned economy, lowers efficiency of the workforce, something for which they could be sued in a foreign country.

By including red tape as one of the ills it has to fight, the government has shifted its focus to the root of corruption rather than the crimes that have already been committed, Wang Xiongjun says.

Integrity and ethics

President Hu Jintao asked all officials in January to adopt a "correct style" both at work and in their personal lives. He urged them to be upright, modest, prudent, hard-working and frugal and not to lead a perverted life. As a major effort to ensure they meet these criteria, officials have to undergo ethics training, an important part of government efforts to check corruption.

Apart from the ethical instructions, from now on discipline authorities will monitor the personal lives of officials more closely. The system, in place since September, requires officials to report their personal details at specific intervals. The mechanism will help the authorities know in greater details about the purchase of homes and cars, marriages or divorces and business activities even of relatives of public officials, especially those above the ministerial level.

Wang Genyun, an anti-graft prosecutor with the Beijing People's Procuratorate, says: "The system makes it mandatory for officials to report their activities and sends a strong signal to all and sundry, warning them against any misconduct The system will help strengthen CPC's supervision over individual officials."

Though many experts agree with Wang Genyun, Tsinghua University professor Ren Jianming doubts whether the mechanism would help eradicate corruption. Officials could easily withhold or disguise information from their reports, he says.

The central government has asked officials to stay away from people who try to use them for their influence in exchange for money, lavish banquets and/or women. Many of the officials arrested last year had an understanding with businesspeople who gave them extravagant gifts and supplied them prostitutes.

The Shanghai pension fund scandal began with the arrest of businessman Zhang Rongkun, whose company was found to have received loans illegally from a firm under the city's labor and social security bureau. It snowballed into one of the country's biggest scams after investigation brought down Shanghai's former Party chief Chen Liangyu, who was also a member of CPC Politburo. The scandal led to the fall of top State statistician Qiu Xiaohua, too.

Institutional deficiencies

Some leaders and experts still say institutional deficiencies both in supervision and promotion are the main reason for corruption to exist. Delivering the Government Work Report last week, Premier Wen said the root cause of problems such as extravagance, bureaucracy, dereliction of duty and even abuse of power and corruption lay in institutional deficiencies and lapse supervision.

Corroborating Wen, Peking University professor Wang Yukai says sometimes whole group of government officials, instead of just one or two of them, are involved in a scandal.

The country's Civil Servant Law, Wang Yukai says, defines legal and ethical boundaries of government officials, and the Criminal Law spells out the rules on graft and bribery. "But they cannot form a comprehensive and firm institutional backup."

Corruption in the judiciary and administrative bodies is at root of the problem, Wang Yukai says, spreading the evil to the functional bureaus. The key problem with the existing government system is its selection and promotion process.

"As long as the people have the final say on the promotion of officials and the power to select and supervise them, the officials won't abuse their power as randomly as they do today," is Wang Yukai's way of dealing with the problem.

(China Daily 03/14/2007 page8)