China needs tougher rules on its cadres, online survey finds

Officials should be subject to tougher discipline, according to more than half of the people polled in a major online survey by Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily and one of its affiliated magazines.

But in another survey of officials by a Shanghai cadre training school, more than 60 per cent of respondents agreed that officials had become slack because they had evaded Beijing's tightened accountability drive.

According to results released on Monday, 55.6 per cent of 4,000 people surveyed by People's Daily and magazine People's Tribune agreed that the present disciplinary measures were not "serious enough", and almost 40 per cent of those respondents said conflicts of interest were the main obstacles to tighter discipline.

Those polled included members of the general public, academics, civil servants and business managers.

Among those who thought the measures should be harsher, 46.2 per cent were civil servants, with People's Daily citing the result as evidence that there was no foundation for arguments that the measures were overly harsh and should be toned down.

But another poll, published in the party's Hongqi Wengao magazine and conducted by the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, found 47.3 per cent of the cadres agreed that official slackness had become more serious and more obvious since the central government introduced rules to cut back on extravagance. The total number of respondents was not disclosed.