Wen steps up battle against corruption
Premier Wen Jiabao wants more transparent management of public finances and government tendering to fight corruption.
He admitted there were serious problems in these areas.
'Corruption is still a recurring problem in some fields, and some cases are so alarming that they have extremely bad implications,' Wen told a State Council meeting on clean governance on March 25. The full text of his speech was released by Xinhua yesterday.
'The root cause is that there isn't a sound system in place and there's a lack of enforcement of existing rules as well as insufficient supervision.'
Wen said efforts to combat corruption last year had helped implicate several high-ranking officials, including Li Tangtang, former Ningxia vice-chairman who was indicted for taking 7.68 million yuan (HK$9.12 million) in bribes between 1998 and 2009.
Former railways minister Liu Zhijun is also under investigation for gross irregularities believed to be linked to murky deals in developing the high-speed network.
Wen said efforts should focus on official abuses of power and dereliction of duty for personal gains, particularly in tenders for public projects, as well as land acquisition and redevelopment - another source of rising public discontent in recent years.
He pushed for stronger self-discipline through schemes that would oblige government officials to disclose their assets. More spending curbs should be imposed for publicly funded overseas trips, vehicle purchases and banquets, he said.
Echoing remarks he made at the end of the National People's Congress plenum last month, Wen said the ultimate solution lay in economic and political reforms.
Tsinghua University professor Ren Jianming said Wen's speech was aimed at pinning down some of the sectors that were either more susceptible to corruption or had become a focal point of public grievance, as was the case with the squandering of public money through government purchases.
Though no official statistics are available, the mainland's huge fleet of official cars, totalling more than five million, costs taxpayers at least 400 billion yuan a year, according to analysts' estimates.
In the area of bidding for public projects, in which officials often wield great power, the professor said the authorities must first address legal flaws in order to plug loopholes once and for all.
'Now it's like asking someone to steer a car with design flaws; you can't expect the driver to go carefully to solve the problem,' Ren said.
In a recent report by the National Audit Office, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway was found to have started three projects totalling 4.4 billion yuan before the tendering period, rendering the bidding process a sham.
