China Takes Aim at Corruption

BEIJING, Jan. 7 -- In the face of rising discontent over corruption, China's senior Communist Party leaders called on members Saturday to work harder to stop bribery among businessmen and local officials in the country's thousands of cities, counties and villages.

The appeal, in a communique issued after a two-day meeting of the party's Central Discipline Inspection Committee that was attended by President Hu Jintao, seemed to take particular aim at corrupt rural officials whose illegal dealings have helped generate a wave of riots and peasant unrest over the past two years. Much of the violence has stemmed from anger over land confiscations in which, farmers allege, village or county officials took money from business developers in return for favorable deals.

"More anti-corruption education will be carried out among grass-roots officials, while the procedures for selecting officials for promotion will be stricter," the official New China News Agency quoted the communique as saying.

As China moves from socialism toward a market economy, local party officials have adopted economic growth as their main goal, creating a de facto alliance with private businessmen. In the shared race for profits, opportunities for corruption have become numerous. As a result, the party officials called upon to fight the corruption are in most instances the very ones involved in it.

Hu warned his fellow Communist leaders that "the fight against corruption is a long-term, complicated and arduous task," the news agency reported.

The committee also singled out the spread of bribery in China's health system, a source of increasingly angry grumbling among people in the city and countryside alike. Doctors and hospitals have taken to demanding payoffs, above and beyond normal fees, before proceeding with medical care, Chinese complain. Among people who once enjoyed free medical coverage, this practice has produced particular outrage.

Li Xi, the Health Ministry's discipline inspection leader, said 1,248 people in the medical profession were punished during 2005 for malfeasance that involved payments totaling more than $1.3 million, the agency reported.