CHINA:CHINA'S RULING Communist Party has unveiled a five-year plan to combat corruption in public life, saying the party's survival depends on how it deals with the "grim and arduous task" of fighting graft.
The 2008-2012 plan aims to encourage more transparency through public hearings and consultation meetings with professional bodies, a surprising development from the normally secretive party.
The party is broadly popular in China, but complaints about the nefarious practices of corrupt cadres are common throughout the country, and the five-year plan recognises the need to address these concerns if the party is to maintain its grip on power.
"Resolutely punishing and effectively preventing corruption relates to whether the people support you or not and to the party's life-and-death survival," said the report.
State-owned companies must create "legal, clean and democratic management" and the plan aims to "correct sybaritic and wasteful spending of the government's money by bosses of state-owned corporations," the China Dailyreported.
Premier Wen Jiabao referred to the need to clean up graft in his address to the party congress earlier this year, with the focus on self-supervision, and the report said the system of "internal party supervision" should be improved. From now on, the internal supervision system will answer to the politburo, one of the highest echelons of power in the party.
Corruption in public life has been blamed for poor supervision of health and safety rules at companies or a lack of supervision of food production, and there have been numerous efforts to eliminate this kind of damaging graft.
Another key development is a call on the media to help supervise the government and the party, promising that constructive criticism would be welcomed and examples of corruption would be dealt with at a senior level.
A major gripe in China is about land use, how collectively owned rural land is parcelled out for development by officials, often to unscrupulous property developers, without asking the local farmers. A report this month by China's audit office said city governments kept more than 70 per cent of revenues from land sales off their books, and a key focus of the new plan is to clean up the system. Anyone caught engaged in corrupt practices would be punished "and no such behaviour would be condoned," it said.
Authorities have punished 43 officials for misconduct over disaster relief efforts following the Sichuan earthquake, including 12 who were sacked.
The complaints related to the misuse of tents and the improper distribution of food and other relief goods, though no charges of corruption were involved.