China's Wen calls for an end to `waste and extravagance'

China will launch another drive in the Lunar New Year to stamp out runaway corruption, especially red tape and collusion between officials and businesspeople, Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said in a speech carried by state media yesterday.

China has been battling rampant corruption for several years, with high-level officials arrested in cities around the country and leaders such as Wen and President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) admitting the problem threatened the communist government's grip on power.

"A handful of graft cases involving high-ranking officials have had a very negative impact on society," Wen told an annual State Council anti-corruption meeting, according to the People's Daily.

"Waste and extravagance are rampant among officials and some issues concerning common people's immediate interests remained unsolved," he said ahead of the Lunar New Year, which starts on Feb. 18.

Chinese political circles have been stunned in the past year over high-level arrests, including Shanghai's former Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu (陳良宇), detained in a widening pension fund scandal that has ensnared more than a dozen officials and business executives.

Chen was the highest-level party official to be axed in more than a decade, but other prominent officials have also been arrested, including Zheng Xiaoyu (鄭筱萸), the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, accused of taking bribes to approve shoddy drugs blamed in a string of deaths.

The country's former top statistician Qiu Xiaohua (邱曉華) is also accused of taking bribes and having more than one wife, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency last month, and Beijing's former vice mayor, Liu Zhihua (劉志華), in charge of overseeing Olympic construction projects, was fired and handed over to prosecutors to face bribery charges last year.

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.

Wen said there had to be a cut in government red tape, including how projects are improved; the fight against commercial bribery had to continue; that the trend to build and renovate government offices had to be stopped; and that officials should promote "a thrifty lifestyle."

Many government and party officials in China have become rich as the country modernizes its economy.

China has already had several anti-graft campaigns, and Xinhua said that since 2003, more than 67,000 government officials have been punished for corruption, with more than 17,500 prosecuted and sentenced in the first eight months of last year.