Anti-Corruption Officials Laud the Internet

After another year in which prominent corruption scandals and embarrassing controversies were brought to widespread public attention on the Internet–despite an intensifying clampdown on information by the government–you might think the government isn’t a big fan of the Internet’s role in the corruption issue.

Bloomberg News

Wu Yuliang, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s central commission for discipline inspection, spoke at a news conference in Beijing about anti-corruption efforts on Dec. 29, 2010.

Not so, they say. In first white paper on corruption, titled “China’s Efforts to Combat Corruption and Build a Clean Government,” the State Council Information Office, praised the Internet’s role in enhancing public supervision. “In recent years, with the rapid development and popularity of the Internet,” the paper said, “supervision through the Internet has become a new form of supervision by public opinion that spreads quickly, produces great influence and features a wider range of participation.”

“China highly values the positive role played by the Internet in enhancing supervision,” it said, adding that efforts would be made to ensure that incidents of corruption can be easily recorded through the Internet via a feedback system that offers “a convenient and unimpeded channel for the public to exercise their right of supervision.”

Why, then, does the government regularly censor discussion of controversial corruption cases on the Internet? The report didn’t explain.

At a press conference discussing the report Wednesday, officials said that 119,000 cases of corruption were investigated last year in total, which was slightly higher than the year before. The government “has a clear goal and task to combat corruption and to build a clean government,” said Wu Yuliang, secretary general of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for Discipline Inspection. The government seeks to strengthen its anti-corruption activities by “keeping the blood and flesh ties between the party and the masses.”

The white paper listed the results of a number of anti-corruption campaigns, including one against commercial bribery launched in 2005 that dealt with tens of thousands of cases involving 16.59 billion yuan. It said that more than 7,000 leading cadres were held responsible for mistakes in “decision making, dereliction of duty, and ineffective management and supervision.”

The report also said that a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics has found that the rate of satisfaction with the work of combating corruption and building a clean government rose to 70.6% in 2010 from 51.9% in 2003 with an increasing percentage of citizens think corruption has been kept down–numbers that seem incongruous with increasing public discussion of corruption and acknowledgements by top officials that corruption is a serious threat.

And despite the government’s touted achievements, Chinese reporters lobbed questions at officials during the press conference, questioning them about spending on government cars, transparency, the effectiveness of efforts to track corrupt officials in hiding, and about giving local officials too much discretionary power which in turn has bred more corruption. One reporter from China Central Radio called the provided statistics “superficial” and said they didn’t address the root causes of corruption and how the government is dealing with them.

Mr. Wu said spending on publicly funded vehicles is a key issue for 2011, and that the government has taken steps to reduce the amount spent on cars. The amount spent on cars, meals, and travel was reduced by 15.8 billion yuan ($2.39 billion) in 2009 and 5.7 billion yuan ($860.82 million) this year, he said, without disclosing how much was spent in total during those years.

When the officials were asked to disclose their salaries in the spirit of transparency, Mr. Wu said he wasn’t sure but guessed that he makes 5,000 yuan ($755) a month. He was the only one to respond to the question. Low state salaries are often blamed for fostering corruption.

Hao Mingjin, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Supervision, said the central government efforts would include the supervision of departments at all levels, including local governments, to do a good job, and Yang Zhenjiang, member of the Procuratorial Committee of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, said China cooperates with “many countries” to repatriate fugitive corrupt officials and recoup losses.

–Loretta Chao, with contributions from Gao Sen