In the first six months of this year over 10,000 employees of 11 provincial-level and 18 major city governments have been held responsible following a national campaign to crack down on lax administrative law enforcement, said a senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at a news conference in Beijing Thursday.

 

Gan Yisheng, secretary-general and spokesman of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC, said at the news conference that the officials were all involved in administrative law enforcement cases and failed to perform their duties appropriately.  

 

In the first half of this year Gan said the commission had improved its supervision of administrative operations and this had significantly helped in exercising its management role. "China is pushing forward its anti-corruption efforts in an in-depth way and seeks to prevent corruption at the root," said Gan.

 

He added that to this end reforms were being carried out in the personnel, judicial, administrative, fiscal, tax, investment and financial sectors.

 

From early this year to the first half of 2007 the CPC, with more than 70 million members, will reshuffle the posts of more than 100,000 officials at provincial, prefectural, county and township levels. The content of Thursday's news conference was viewed as the CPC warning officials to obey the law when carrying out their work.  

 

Gan said the CPC's inspection work, which is done by the commission and the Organizational Department of the CPC Central Committee at central level, has also scored many successes in assisting supervise in the operation of administrative power.

 

Statistics from the commission show that a total of 489 cities and 888 counties had been drawn into the inspections by the CPC's provincial-level disciplinary and organizational departments.

 

This has been identified as a major anti-corruption drive with China in the process of building an effective system to ensure the government affairs are appropriately handled and made public.

 

So far 53 of all the central departments directly under the State Council have set-up special leading groups to manage the initiative with 28 of them actually writing rules on the subject.

 

"To promote the openness of the government affairs is a major part of the development of socialist democracy," said He Yong, deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

 

(Xinhua News Agency July 28, 2006)