The discipline inspection team of the Communist Party of China reported that most of the discipline problems it has found concerned the corruption of local leading officials.

The inspection team was formed in August 2003 under President Hu Jintao's call for Party supervision reform. Working under the CPC's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the team is responsible for supervising local government work and reporting directly to the central commission.

According to the decades-old practices, local governments were only subject to local discipline inspection, but inspectors were under the leadership of, or on the payroll of, the departments they supervised.

The inspectors from the central commission previously only dipped into files and had a brief contact with the colleagues of the person under inspection, said the newspaper, "so local corruption was kept undercover for a long time."

Since its inception, the team, with five groups and 45 inspectors, has finished its inspection in seven provinces and filed several reports back to Beijing.

"We return to Beijing on a 20-to-30-day basis with either oral or written reports mostly on problems concerning leading officials' corruption and misuse of power in promotion," said an inspector.

The new inspection team can stay for three to five months and is entitled to supervise through individual talks, file checking, and public opinion gathering, an official with the inspection office said.

"They are more likely to dig out some dirt because they are free from local authorities," he said, adding that "Inspectors will not be informed where they will be sent to beforehand and will be re-located regularly to avoid any inspector-inspectee links."

"Though diverse forms of inspection can be adopted and sufficient time is given, we still struggle to get the truth," said one inspector who just returned from an investigation.

Critics point out that the inspection team, no matter how long they stay in local regions, can only supervise when they are there. After they returned, corruption would return.

And finally, the question of who will supervise the inspection team remains unanswered, said the report.

The commission is now redoubling its efforts to meet all these challenges, the report said, and enhancing the inspection system was set as a major task in the government's 2004 anti-corruption drive early Tuesday.

(People’s Daily January 16, 2004)