China's judiciary agencies have extended focus of corruption targets to bribe givers, as prosecutors expanded a blacklist of bribers to all industries to uproot corruption.

The blacklist database, covering the country's all bribers convicted by Chinese court since 1997 when an amendment to the Criminal Law took effect, was opened for public scrutiny earlier this month.

Individuals or organizations can refer to the blacklist of bribe cases, to see if their cooperation candidates have any record of bribery.

According to a regulation on the use of the database, the blacklist system aims to curb job-related crimes and business bribery.

"It intends to eradicate the hidden rule of power-for-money deal and prevent corruption by curbing bribe offering," it says.

Foreigners and international companies convicted of bribery by Chinese courts are also included in the database.

Earlier last month, the Shanghai procuratorate approved the arrest of four employees of the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Ltd., including Stern Hu, an Australian citizen of Chinese origin and general manager of the company's Shanghai office, on charges of illegally obtaining business secrets and bribery.

An official with the job-related crime prevention department of the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said it alarmed people who were thinking of offering bribes, as their names and acts would remain in the database and be exposed to the public. The record cannot be deleted or changed.

Free inquiry can be made in all levels of procuratorate across China with an ID card and a written application letter clarifying the aim of inquiry. The object of inquiry could be people or companies in any regions on the Chinese mainland since all blacklist databases form a national network.

Previously, most of these bribery databases in different regions were not connected and people have to travel or write inquiry letters for cross-provincial inquiries.

The regulation says procuratorates must reply inquirers within three days, including the time when a briber offered money, the sum, the time being convicted by courts and other related information about this briber, who could be the inquirer's cooperation candidates.

Judiciary organizations should not be involved in the handling of the result of inquiry, it says.

Prof. Huang Zongliang of Beijing University told Xinhua: "It takes two to make a quarrel. Corruption cannot be wiped out if bribers are always there to lure."

Huang said, "Previously, people taking bribes had always been a priority target in corruption fighting as bribe takers were mostly powerful people or officials who had influence. However, bribe offering should be severely punished as well."

"Money and power are easily colluding with each other, and the crackdown upon bribers is an important part of fighting corruption," said Huang, who gave a lecture in 2004 on capability building and corruption fighting of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) to the 25-member Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the highest-ranking Party officials.

The SPP initiated the blacklist in January 2006 which covered bribers in five sectors including construction, finance, medical service, education and government procurement.

The list has been extended to bribers of all industries after Sept. 1 as bribery is common in sectors such as land expropriation, housing relocation, urban law enforcement, power grid restructuring, energy development and rural construction.

The urban construction sector has always been vulnerable to bribery.

The SPP said Thursday that bribery in urban construction projects accounted for nearly 40 percent of all the 6,277 business bribery cases Chinese prosecutors dealt with in the first six months, which involved 918 million yuan (about US$134 million) in total.

More than 77 percent of the cases were charged with "taking bribes" and 19 percent with "paying bribes," the SPP said.

In 2009, prosecutors across the country stepped up checking on bribery in the businesses of construction, land transfer, property trade, insurance and bank credit as the public voiced strong dissatisfaction over the obscurity of these industries.

China's Criminal Law says if one offers bribes worth more than 10,000 yuan to seek illegal gains, or to more than three people, to Party or government officials or judiciary staff, which incurs great damage to state or social interests, this person would be charged with offering bribes and would likely to receive prison terms from below five years to life imprisonment.

But penalties could be exempted or alleviated if suspects voluntarily confessed, the law says.

Taking bribes would receive heavier penalties than offering bribes in China. Chinese law rules that government employees who take bribes of more than 100,000 yuan would be sentenced to over 10 years in prison and those who commit more serious crimes might face life imprisonment or execution.

The CPC Central Committee made clear in a work plan on building a corruption prevention system (2008-2012): "The aim of setting up a blacklist database on commercial bribery is to take illegal trading, especially bribe offering, as an important factor for not granting market admittance."

The SPP official said the database was to show the "heavy cost of offering bribes" and promote honest and credible business operation, ordered market competition and social justice.

The SPP ordered that all provincial procuratorates should have all the convicted bribers blacklisted for public inquiry in 2006.

Eastern China's Zhejiang Province established the country's first provincial bribery blacklist in 2003, focusing on the construction field.

A total of 60,748 companies and 63,179 people made inquiries in the previous Zhejiang database of five industries. A total of 102 offenders were identified, according to the province's procuratorate.

The unnamed SPP official said referring to the blacklist would be an "unofficial procedure" for individuals and companies to undergo administrative examination and approval, public tender or finding a business partner.

In March 2009, a construction company was eliminated from a tender when the procuratorate of Beilun district of Ningbo City, upon the request of the tenderer, found its legal representative surnamed Lai was convicted of bribery in 2007.

In another case, a representative of a medical group affiliated to a foreign-funded corporation in Shanghai went to the local procuratorate to find out whether a retail trader surnamed Wang, who is the general manager of a medical equipment company, had offered bribes.

The procuratorate replied that Wang had been sentenced to imprisonment of three years with a four-year reprieve on Nov. 15, 2005. Between December 2003 and April 2005, Wang offered bribes worth 430,000 yuan to companies with business connections to seek illegal gains.

The medical group immediately cut the partnership ties with the retail trader and "educated all subordinate traders on honest operation," according to the procuratorate.

The SPP official said the blacklist also provided solid evidence for judiciary departments to analyze the trend of crimes offering bribes.

(Xinhua News Agency September 6, 2009)