Strictly enforce rules to fight graft

Editor's note: At a symposium on "Governance: Anti-corruption and Financial Reform" at Peking University on Friday, two Chinese scholars and two South Korea scholars shared their views on how to promote the anti-corruption campaign. Below are excerpts of their speeches:

More than 5 million Communist Party of China members and government officials have been penalized by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in the past three decades for breaking Party regulations. And more than 100 of the 500 officials above the provincial/ministerial level penalized by commission have stood trial for corruption.

The Third Plenum of the 18th CCDI of the CPC was held earlier this year. In a keynote speech at the plenum, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping said corruption has to be fought in three ways: by supporting the anti-corruption campaign through the deepening of reforms; by granting various levels of disciplinary committees relatively more independence and power; and by strengthening supervision over power and building a scientific power structure.

Xi's speech and the plenum marked not only the leadership's firm determination to root out corruption, but also the Party's shift from fighting corruption with power to fighting corruption with regulations, which is a key step forward.

The shift, however, will depend on five factors. First, the authorities have to set up some special governance reform zones to test new anti-corruption measures before extending the successful ones across the country. In fact, there have been some local attempts at such reform: in Ya'an, Sichuan province, the authorities directed local officials to hold direct elections for CPC representatives, and in Changzhi, Shanxi province, the media were encouraged to play a bigger role in supervising local officials. It is a pity that other cities have not emulated such examples.

Second, the power structure of various levels of Party committees needs to be reformed. The structure, copied from the Soviet Union, allows too much power to be concentrated in one hand, which is the main cause of corruption in both planned and market economies. A possible solution is to divide the Party committees' powers into three hands - a committee to make decisions, another to execute the decisions, and a third, more independent disciplinary committee as the supervision body. Such a possibility was discussed as early as in 1956, at the 8th CPC National Congress, and the ongoing reform should follow that path. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping, too, mentioned this in his important speech "Reform of the System of Party and State Leadership".

Third, the existing system of promotion needs urgent reforms. Way back in 1871, the Paris Commune prompted Karl Marx to conclude that election is better than "hierarchical investiture". The former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries betrayed this principle by imposing leaders' will upon people at the lower levels. In such a system, people serving the personal interests of leaders get promoted while those defending the rights of the people are marginalized. The Party has long realized the detrimental effects of such a system and is determined to reform it.

Fourth, the Party needs to truly rally its ordinary members and ordinary people in the campaign against corruption. If supervisors don't respect ordinary people and follow only their leaders, they would soon start losing people's trust, without which it is impossible to root out corruption. In this Information Age, supervisors should use the Internet as an efficient platform and listen to ordinary people's voices through different mediums.

And fifth, new supervisors should not ignore the corruption cases left pending by their predecessors. More than 30 years ago, Deng said that large, instead of small, numbers of officials were involved in corruption. Therefore, the success of the anti-corruption drive depends on reducing obstacles on the "battlefield". For instance, the authorities could experiment by asking only newly appointed, rather than all, officials to declare their assets and pardoning some corrupt officials if they vow to reform themselves.

Li Yongzhong is deputy dean of China Disciplinary Inspection and Supervision College.