1.2 million punished in China’s anti-graft drive: Watchdog

BEIJING: Nearly 1.2 million people have been punished in China’s ongoing anti-graft campaign, a senior official has said, promising that the government will doubledown on the drive that some say is a political purge.

As part of the campaign, nearly 2,600 fugitives have been extradited or repatriated, and 8.6 billion yuan (RM5.4 billion) worth of assets have been recovered, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), said in a statement published on the organisation’s web site on Monday.

China has extradition treaties with 48 countries, including Spain, Italy, and France, which returned a fugitive to China last September.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, senior CCDI official Luo Dongchuan pledged that the campaign would continue, saying that the government should “keep the crushing momentum against corruption”, according to a press briefing transcript posted on the group’s web site.

But the number of corruption cases reported to the watchdog last year decreased for the first time since 2012, another official, Xiao Pei, said, without giving a specific figure.

He said of the 2016 cases, 57,000 were self-confessions.

Around 410,000 officials, 76 of whom ranked at the ministerial level or above, were punished in 2016, the state-run China Daily reported on Monday.

The CCDI statement followed an announcement that Beijing would be tightening the reins on anti-corruption investigators after more than 7,900 across the country, including 17 from the commission itself, were punished for their own wrongdoing. – AFP