Anti-corruption action

The concern the media has shown to the anti-corruption seminar convened on Saturday by Wang Qishan, secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China, points to the hopes the public has pinned on the new Party leadership for more intensified action against corruption.

While there is no question about the high degree of consensus both inside and outside the Party on the damage abuse of power has done and will do to both the Party and the country, what most people are truly concerned about is where the breakthrough is to be made for the establishment of a mechanism that can place the exercise of public power in the sunshine.

The repeated exposure of problematic officials on the Internet in recent days and the high accuracy in targeting the right ones - which has been verified by the investigations that followed - have given further prominence to the lack of an effective institutional mechanism to stop officials from laying their hands on interests they are not entitled to.

Most scholars at the seminar proposed that it should be compulsory for government officials to declare their personal property and that this information should be disclosed to the public.

This could be an effective way to catch power abusers since most of the officials brought to light in recent days were exposed through their displays of luxury goods, such as watches, or the number of houses in their possession.

True, such disclosures would act as a deterrent, and it would be a way for taxpayers to exercise their right of supervision over civil servants.

However, this is not the first time such a proposal has been raised to the central authorities. And some local governments have been talking about experimenting with this for years.

Whatever effect the suggestions of the experts at the seminar have on the decision of the central authorities about the disclosure of officials' properties, the public is definitely waiting for a breakthrough to be made by the new Party leadership in this regard.

(China Daily 12/04/2012 page8)