【2010.2.25 TIMES】Lavish living falls foul of party code to stop corruption in Ch

和解团结

【原文链接】http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol ... /article7040130.ece
【作者】Jane Macartney

【原文】

Box after box of Martell Cordon Bleu cognac was delivered to the house-warming party. More than 400 guests sat down to dine. About 1,000 people queued to present the host with red envelopes filled with cash. The question was: how could a small-town police chief afford such a lavish spread?

At a wedding banquet the father of the bride spent the equivalent of £55,000 to serve such delicacies as shark’s fin soup and abalone to his 1,100 friends. Again, questions were asked about how an airport police officer could come up with that kind of cash.
In China the answer is usually corruption, and the Communist Party is so anxious about the problem that it has now issued a new code of ethics, outlining 52 rules that officials must follow in a campaign to create clean government. The rules specifically ban party officials from laying on lavish weddings — or funerals.

Using luxury cars and squandering large sums to build glitzy government buildings are forbidden. Also prohibited are expensive recreational activities and costly overseas travel. Insider trading is on the list. Officials who resign or retire are banned for three years from taking a job in enterprises with links to their previous job.

Officials are prohibited from accepting cash as a gift and are not allowed to use their power to benefit family members. They may not be involved in for-profit activities or set up businesses overseas.

At the moment such practices are widespread. Streets in cities and towns across China are clogged with large top-of-the-range Audis, BMWs and Mercedes-Benz cars equipped with special horns that indicate that lesser, non-official vehicles should give way.

One county in central China is famed for building a copy of the White House as its government offices. One provincial capital swiftly sold off a new skyscraper built as the government headquarters when officials learnt that a senior Beijing party leader would be paying a visit.

Such tales are commonplace in a country over which a single party holds sway, where courts answer to Communist mandarins and where checks and balances effectively do not exist.

The justice system itself is not immune. Only last month a former vice-president of the Supreme Court was sentenced to life imprisonment for embezzlement and accepting about half a million pounds in bribes.

Publication of the rules follows a fresh attempt by the President, Hu Jintao, to establish the party’s “superior morality”.The National Bureau of Corruption Prevention and the Ministry of Supervision have made it a priority to monitor more closely the expenses of “naked officials” — those whose family members have moved overseas. About 4,000 corrupt officials fled the country with $50 billion between 1978 and 2003 after first sending their spouses and children abroad, state media said this week.the new rules were carried in full on the front page of the Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily. They replace a previous code introduced on a trial basis in 1997. The party said: “The fight against corruption is being intensified in the new era.”

Corruption consistently tops lists of grievances in opinion polls. The party has said repeatedly, for more than a decade, that corruption poses the greatest threat to its grip on power.

The rules will be studied throughout the 76-million-member party over the next few weeks and accompanied by warnings of severe punishment and criminal charges for those who violate the code of ethics. Corruption carries a maximum penalty of death in China but that has yet to act as a deterrent.

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