2008-6-23 17:56
triphop
摘录自 <经济学人>
Despite worries about the damage corruption does to the Communist Party's reputation, efforts
to stamp it out remain half-hearted
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CORRUPTION, Chinese officials often fret out loud, could destroy the Communist Party—such is the
popular anger it provokes and so at odds is it with the ideals the party espouses. Yet frequent crackdowns
and the occasional toppling of sleazy officials appear to have little impact. Nor, many fear, will a new anticorruption
agency, due to be set up this year. As they jockey for position before a crucial party gathering
in the autumn, China's leaders are in no mood for serious reform.
In Shanghai and Beijing, where big corruption scandals involving top officials have been exposed in recent
months, new cases of alleged high-level wrongdoing are still coming to light. In Beijing the state-owned
media reported last week that Zhou Liangluo, the chief of Haidian district, home to many of the city's
universities and high-tech companies, had been detained for allegedly engaging in shady property deals.
In Shanghai it emerged earlier this month that Yin Guoyuan, a former deputy head of the housing bureau,
was being investigated for similar reasons.
Despite the anxious rhetoric, the party is not on the brink of collapse. But the scandals of the past few
months have stoked debate within its ranks and more widely in China about the need for better ways of
dealing with corruption. Officials have been studying anti-corruption agencies elsewhere, notably in Hong
Kong and Singapore, which rate highly in regional league tables of clean government. Singapore's
authoritarian tendencies and Hong Kong's lack of democracy make them, for some Chinese officials,
especially appealing models.
In the build-up to a five-yearly party congress due later this year, Chinese leaders have been stressing the
need to build a “harmonious society”. Making officials more honest is portrayed as vital to this endeavour.
The congress will be the first presided over by Hu Jintao, state president as well as head of the party, as
China's paramount leader. It will be an important opportunity for him to promote his supporters and show
what he has achieved in five years in power. But when it comes to tackling corruption, Mr Hu is hesitant
about changing the system.
Few are impressed by plans revealed in February to set up a Corruption Prevention Bureau. Its remit
remains unclear, but Ren Jianming of Tsinghua University in Beijing believes it will not have investigative
powers. It will probably report to the Ministry of Supervision, responsible for standards in the bureaucracy,
or directly to the State Council, China's cabinet. But Mr Ren says the party's own anti-corruption agency,
Claudio Munoz
the Central Disciplinary Inspection Commission (CDIC), will still decide which top officials should be
investigated and punished.
Officials say that the new bureau will help China fulfil its obligations under the United Nations' 2003
convention against corruption, which requires signatories to have a corruption-prevention agency. The
convention is vague about what this body should do, but says it should be able to operate “free from any
undue influence”. Chinese officials have not spelled out how this will be attempted.
In the past five years, Mr Hu has done little to make the CDIC less vulnerable to the whims of party
leaders. The CDIC's action last September against Shanghai's Communist Party chief, Chen Liangyu, led to
his arrest, dismissal and suspension from the Politburo for alleged misuse of pension funds. But it raised
suspicions that Mr Hu was using the commission to settle scores with a rival party faction. Mr Chen was
replaced last month as Shanghai's party chief by Xi Jinping, who is close to Mr Hu. Mr Xi, like a sprinkling
of other senior Chinese officials, is the offspring of one of communist China's founding fathers. Such
“princelings” are on the rise.
Some of China's bolder newspapers have hinted that Mr Hu could be doing more to clean things up. They
have noted that Vietnam—hardly a model of clean government—last month issued a decree requiring
legislators and senior officials to declare their assets. China imposes no such burden on legislators;
officials are subject only to patchily and secretively enforced requirements to report their incomes.
Officials have brushed aside proposals by some members of China's parliament for a law aimed at
ensuring better compliance. Frustration with official corruption is one reason why most of China's high
earners ignored a new rule requiring them to fill out personal income-tax returns by the beginning of this
month.
Despite an occasional combative streak, the media hardly ever report corruption cases without official
approval. It was only this month that they reported the arrest by investigators last August of Zhang
Weihua, the deputy head of a state-run lottery intended to raise money for sports, including for facilities
for next year's Olympic Games in Beijing. An audit in 2005 found that the lottery had diverted 558m yuan
($72m) into subsidiaries, which paid some of the money as bonuses to staff.
Mr Hu has tweaked the system a bit. In recent months, during a shuffle of provincial leadership posts, he
managed to ensure that discipline-inspection commissions in the provinces are led by CDIC officials from
Beijing, or by anti-corruption officials from other provinces. In the past these roles have usually been filled
by placemen of the provincial party chiefs, rendering them useless in investigating corruption cases
involving the top echelons of the party. Even so, the impact of the reform may be limited. According to
the party charter, provincial commissions must still inform local party leaders if they plan to investigate
them for corruption.
The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has been forthright, at least in admitting the extent of the problem. At a
news conference last month, he said that corruption had been getting “more and more serious”, a
departure from the party's usual line that its clean-up is having some success. Mr Wen must have bitten
his tongue. In the official transcript published by the Chinese press, his remarks were more cautious:
corruption was only “quite serious” in some places and departments. The media did report his unoriginal
but far-reaching suggestion that one remedy would be more political reform. But there is little sign that
Chinese leaders are eager to pursue that.