Beijing – President Hu Jintao has vowed to tighten a crackdown on rampant corruption amid the growing number of arrests of top Communist Party officials and senior judges across China for graft and other misdeeds.
Hu, who is also general secretary of the party, has warned that unless corruption is brought under control, it will undermine Communist control in the country.
The government faces an “arduous fight against corruption,” Hu said in comments delivered to the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which ended a three-day meeting in Beijing on Wednesday.
A string of arrests last year highlighted the depth of the graft problem, with Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu arrested and expelled from the party’s powerful Politburo in connection with a scandal over alleged misuse of more than $380 million in pension funds.
He was the highest-level official arrested for corruption in a decade, and his case followed that of Liu Zhihua, a former Beijing vice mayor in charge of overseeing Olympic construction projects who was fired and handed over to prosecutors to face bribery charges.
Beijing officials have said that Liu’s alleged misdeeds did not involve Olympic projects, but his dismissal has put a cloud over preparations for the 2008 Summer Games. Liu took several million dollars in bribes “and helped his mistress to seek profit in projects,” state media reported.
Hu said corruption was a threat to China’s economic, political and cultural development.
“We must deepen anti-corruption efforts and build a clean government,” he said, although he acknowledged that calls to crack down on corruption were often ignored by local officials.
There have been frequent protests, some violent, in recent years in villages around the country where residents have reacted to land seizures and other corrupt acts by local government and party officials.
A communique released at the end of the meeting warned that party members “who gamble and those involved in illegal property deals will be the focus of an intensified crackdown on corruption,” the official Xinhua News Agency said.
