Guangzhou orders village chiefs to hand over passports to prevent corrupt from fleeing

Guangzhou has ordered its 2,000 village chiefs to hand over their passports to their superiors, extending a policy aimed at preventing corrupt officials from fleeing overseas.

The move, branded as a mainland first, was announced by the city's anti-graft agency, which said about a quarter of its cases involved village chiefs.

"In more prosperous and urbanised villages, if we do not beef up our work [on graft prevention] … they will turn into disaster zones of corruption," agency spokesman Mei Heqing was yesterday quoted by the Legal Daily as saying. Most cases were tied to land grabs carried out amid the accelerating urbanisation programme.

Guangzhou's new regulation would bring village officials in line with existing requirements for municipal officials and above. They will need to obtain their superiors' approval for personal and business trips outside the mainland.

President Xi Jinping vowed in January to target graft among both common "flies" and higher-up "tigers". The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank, published a report in August saying graft at the lower level did more harm to the nation than corruption at the top.

Mei said most of the village chiefs brought to his agency's attention were accused of embezzling funds allocated for land compensation or taking bribes to lease out seized properties at low prices.

Mei cited as an example the graft investigation early this year at Xian village in Guangzhou. Officials from the body that manages collectively owned land allegedly transferred plots to developers at a fraction of the market rate, according to a report by Nanfang Daily.