Senior Chinese leader visits post-quake Sichuan
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Senior Chinese leader He Guoqiang has concluded a tour to southwest Sichuan Province to inspect the reconstruction work, three years after a strong earthquake rocked the province.
He, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the inspection tour from Tuesday to Wednesday, as the third anniversary of the 8.0-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, approaches.
"The supervision and inspection over the reconstruction work has been carried out strictly, which has helped prevent corruption and ensure that relief and reconstruction are done in a clean and transparent way," said He, who is head of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
He said experience gained from overseeing the rebuilding work could provide reference for tightening monitoring efforts on related major projects.
During his third visit to Beichuan, a quake-leveled county of the province, in these three years, He said this time he saw a beautiful new county featuring distinct cultural characteristics of the Qiang ethnic group.
Li Wenqiong, a local resident in Beichuan County, told He that her new house only cost her family around 30,000 yuan (4,619 U.S. dollars), and the government paid the rest of the house's cost, providing over 40,000 yuan in subsidies.
The 2008 Wenchuan quake left about 87,000 people dead or missing.
A total of 27,564 post-quake reconstruction projects, out of the planned 29,692 projects, had been completed, and 91 percent of the total budget of 865.8 billion yuan, had been spent, said Wei Hong, vice governor of Sichuan, last month.
