Courts target corruption at lower levels

Judges to intensify punishments in attempt to eradicate bad behavior

Beijing judges vowed on Wednesday to increase their efforts to clean up corruption by intensifying punishments of officials at lower levels, where misconduct makes up the highest proportion of offenses.

The Beijing No 1 Intermediate People’s Court, located in the western part of the capital — where there are many government departments and colleges — issued a report on Wednesday saying that 2,306 officials had been punished for misconduct since 1995, when the court was established, and of those, 1,756 were at county or lower level.

“It means that lower-level officials, often called ‘flies’, have been a hard-hit group in the country’s recent crackdowns against corruption,” said Tao Wei, chief judge of the court’s No 2 Criminal Division, which specializes in graft cases.

He told China Daily that the lower-level corrupt officials come from various departments, some of which might even be ignored, but the amount of money they embezzled and the bribes they accepted were not small.

In July 2008, for example, the court sentenced Wang Yuanli, head of Yanshan cleaning team in the city’s Fangshan district, to life in prison after it found he took advantage of his position to embezzle more than 2.2 million yuan ($315,000) from August 1997 to December 2005 after signing garbage cleanup contracts with 14 departments.

“Some corrupt officials, such as Wang, had real power to abuse, even though they were at lower-level positions,” Tao said. “What they did was much easier to arouse public outrage, because they were closer to common residents.”

He added that the corruption found at lower levels also means that defendants are relatively young.

The report stated that about 40 percent of officials who stood trial for misusing their positions were age 35 to 45; the youngest defendant punished by the court was 20.

Ma Yuanying, a Beijing lawyer, was worried about corrupt officials being younger and committing crimes at lower levels.

“They will breed more serious corruption or turn into ‘tigers’ — high-level offenders — if we don’t fight at the beginning,” she said. “Judicial authorities should continue to strictly penalize official misconduct at lower levels, and disclose their cases regularly.”

The city’s supervisory commission disclosed on Oct 15 that 66 officials at bureau or higher level and more than 800 officials at county or lower level were punished for breaching discipline rules of the Communist Party of China between January and September.