Petitions official Xu Jie placed under investigation for corruption
No details given about the detention of Xu Jie, whose profile was removed from the website of the office that handles public grievances
A senior official in charge of handling petitions is being investigated by the Communist Party as authorities announced plans to reform the system for dealing with formal complaints from the public, which some critics argue is rife with corruption.
The detention of Xu Jie, deputy chief of the State Bureau for Letters and Calls, is the latest corruption investigation announced since a meeting of party leaders at the third plenum in Beijing earlier this month promised to intensify efforts to crack down on graft.
Xu had been placed under investigation for serious law and discipline violations, the party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a statement yesterday.
The 58-year-old has held various posts handling petitions from the public, Xinhua reported. No further details were given. Xu's official profile on the bureau's website has been removed.
Yu Jianrong, one of the mainland's most influential anti-graft activists, welcomed the investigation of Xu on his Weibo microblog.
The bureau has become one of the worst breeding grounds for graft, said Yu, a professor at the Rural Development Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has more than 1.7 million followers on the microblogging site.