The Communist Party of China (CPC) has renewed efforts to strengthen supervision over the personal conduct of leading officials to curb corruption and build a clean government.

The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee yesterday called for stricter internal supervision within the Party by better implementing the decade-old Regulations on Reporting Major Personal Matters by Leading Officials.

The move follows a recent spate of corruption cases involving high-ranking officials such as Li Baojin, chief prosecutor of Tianjin, and Zhu Junyi, director of the Shanghai Municipal Labour and Social Security Bureau.

Both are under investigation for accepting a large amount of bribes, with Li accused of receiving favours from the property sector for his mistress.

At a meeting presided by CPC Central Committee General Secretary Hu Jintao, the Political Bureau said the regulations "are important measures to strengthen supervision over leading Party officials and ensure clean and honest government."

"All localities and departments should amend and improve the regulations... and leading Party officials at all levels should strictly implement the regulations," Xinhua News Agency quoted the meeting as saying.

Party discipline and personnel departments should consider leading officials' performance in implementing the regulations as one of the main criteria in their assessment, it added.

Promulgated on January 31, 1997, the regulations were branded as a "sunshine" policy to fight corruption by placing under Party scrutiny all major economic activities of leading Party officials.

The regulations target leading officials in the Party's organs, people's congresses, governments, political advisory organs and judicial departmens at county level or above, as well as cadres whose rank is equivalent to county head or above in State-owned enterprises and companies.

Together with rules such as the Code of Ethical Conduct of Senior Officials, the regulations are aimed at imposing a code of conduct for leading officials.

According to the regulations, leading officials are required to report to the Party within a month if they or their immediate family members build, buy, rent or sell property, marry foreigners, or travel abroad for private reasons.

Under the rules, they must inform higher-ups if their spouses or children are under judicial investigation, if they move abroad or if they run businesses or hold high-ranking positions in joint ventures or mainland branches of overseas companies.

Professor Ren Jianming of the Clean Government Research Office at Tsinghua University said the top Party leaders' new emphasis on the regulations suggests that they had not been well implemented.

"Most corrupt officials were found to have abused their power in exchange of personal gains for their spouses and children," he said.

"If we fail to learn a lesson from the past and continue to do a bad job of supervising leading officials, more of them may fall victim to corruption."

(China Daily 08/30/2006 page1)