China punishes 100,000 Party members in anti-corruption drive

[Robbien]

Beijing, Feb 13: Nearly 100,000 members of China's ruling Communist Party were punished last year for corruption, but eradicating graft in the near future remains a huge challenge, a senior official has said. "Solving the problem of corruption in a short time is almost impossible," Gan Yisheng, a senior party discipline and oversight official, told a press conference here.

Of the 97,260 officials who had been disciplined, more than 80 percent had failed to carry out duties, taken bribes or violated the party's financial rules, said Gan, vice secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

. . .

Gan made little mention of an ongoing corruption case in Shanghai, although it is China's largest graft probe in more than a decade and involves more than 20 senior businessmen and officials, including the city party boss Chen Liangyu. Chen, a member of China's elite Politburo, was sacked in September for his alleged involvement in the misuse of about 400 million dollars of the city's retirement funds for speculative real estate projects.

. . .


In a separate case involving Chinese fugitive Lai Changxing, the alleged boss of a multi-billion-dollar smuggling ring, Gan rejected that he would be sentenced to death or encounter abuse were he to be repatriated from Canada.

Chinese authorities allege that the former labourer was the mastermind behind a 10-billion-dollar smuggling ring that dealt in luxury goods imported through southeast China's Fujian province and bribed government officials.

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?rep=2&aid=353848&sid=WOR

[w4rma]

1. Are they going after corruption or are they going after their competition in the blackmarket? (nt)

[BayCityProgressive]

2. No for

defrauding the people and stealing. I wish our government would route out this many fraudulent politicians and businessmen. Pelosi is off to a good start though!

[w4rma]

3. I'm not convinced that that is what this is really about. The Chinese government is at least as

corrupt as our own, as all fascist governments must be to exist. The majority of the corruption is at the very top, where the "Party" leaders have gotten very very wealthy off of the sell off of public assets in their move to capitalism.

And noone can say anything about them, because doing so either makes you a political prisoner or gets a bullet in your head from one of the Chinese mobile death sentence trucks. (And then your family has to pay for the bullet used to put you down.)

[ohio2007]

4. The party is downsizing next. They have a bureaucratic population that matches

the population of England.
imo, 100k have been given notice. If they don't play by the rulers rules, Big Red will hand out pink slips.

[w4rma]

5. So they are amassing power into fewer hands. (nt)

[manic expression]

6. Fascist?

no way. Ours is Bonapartist at least, but fascist is far different.

China is just a heavy-fisted government which loves to promote the market.

[w4rma]

7. Way to minimalize the acts of one of the worst, if not the worst, human rights abusers in the world.

Real "progressive" of you. "Just a heavy-fisted government", indeed.