China's anti-graft government website reveals culture of lavish spending
Party anti-graft portal runs details of cases to show crackdown on extravagance
A new Communist Party anti-graft website offers a glimpse into the culture of profligate spending and unchecked power that officials in low-level positions across the mainland enjoy.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has added a "case exposure" section to its official website, which it launched on Monday. The commission said it would regularly release details on officials who violated party secretary Xi Jinping's "eight rules" aimed at cutting waste and extravagance.
The first batch consists of 49 cases, handled by six provinces over the past two months. In one case, a senior prosecutor in the Yushu Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Qinghai was photographed by internet users driving an official car to visit relatives in his hometown. He was later dismissed.
In Datong county, a judiciary official received a demerit for using a government car to drive her child to kindergarten every school day for the past two years.
A police officer in Shenzhou in Hebei province lent a government car to a friend who later caused a road accident in which a pedestrian was killed.
In another instance, a police officer in Guiyang , Guizhou province, demanded people first pay him if they wanted him to look into their complaints. An anti-corruption official in Tang county in Hebei used his daughter's wedding to solicit bribes. And in Guangxi's Longsheng county, 36 officials spent nearly 4,000 yuan in public funds to hold a banquet welcoming the county's new leader.
Dr Chen Huirong , an assistant public affairs professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said the exposure of such "relatively trivial" cases was aimed at underlining the authority's latest crackdown on corruption.
