Pledges for more transparency by top Chinese Communist officials made after high-profile graft cases have been met with scepticism that corrupt leaders can come clean over their assets.
“I believe that Chinese officials will gradually make assets public in line with central regulations,” Wang, seen by many observers to have reformist leanings, said during a Congress meeting in answering a foreign reporter’s question.
Yu, meanwhile, said separately that Shanghai would “gradually move towards a system for making [officials’] assets public,” according to the state-run People’s Daily.
But neither official provided any road map forward for improving transparency in a country that has no laws that clearly require government officials to make their assets or salaries public, a situation critics say is ripe for abuse.
The issue of official corruption has shot to the top of the national agenda as Communist Party delegates meet to anoint a new crop of top leaders for the coming decade.