Supervisors appointed to keep an eye on village heads

A district government in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has claimed that complaints against corrupt village officials are down by half since supervisors were introduced into the area's villages in November 2006 to monitor the work of the village heads.

The Ningxia Commission for Discipline Inspection established the scheme last year following reports from some local CPC disciplinary committees that more than 70 percent of complaints and accusations they were receiving were targeting village officials.

Supervisors have been appointed in 1,411 villages, 54 percent of the region's total, to oversee budget allocation which local officials say cut corruption complaints in Jinfeng district in the regional capital of Yinchuan by half in the first six months of this year

Before the advent of the "village supervisor" scheme, Ningxia had full-time supervision officials in all its towns. However, the town officials were unable to oversee every village official due to the large numbers of villages under the jurisdiction of one town and the remoteness of some of their locations, according to the regional disciplinary commission.

However, it remains to be seen how effective the scheme, which has also been introduced to Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangxi, will be in the long-term.

Eighty percent of the newly-appointed village supervisors in Ningxia are actually the deputy heads of the villages and receive no extra salary to perform the role of supervisor.

Last week, China's State Council, or the cabinet, appointed the Minister of Supervision as the head of the new National Corruption Prevention Bureau.

Although few details were available about the establishment of the bureau, Professor Ren Jianmin from the School of Public Policy and Management of Tsinghua University said one of the most important tasks to prevent corruption is to reform the system by which officials are supervised and develop new anti-corruption policies.

According to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) of CPC, 97,260 officials were disciplined last year, more than 80 percent of whom had failed to carry out duties, taken bribes or violated the party's financial rules.

Several high-profile officials have caught in corruption scandals recently, including former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) Zheng Xiaoyu and former party chief of China's economic hub of Shanghai Chen Liangyu.

Source: Xinhua