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Jiang Zemin won lasting applause when he said "All corruptionists must be thoroughly investigated and punished without leniency."
Jiang made the pledge in a report he delivered last Friday at the opening session of the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
"The Communist Party has paid great attention to the corruption of officials and is determined to root it out," said Liu Liying, a delegate to the congress who has long been engaged in discipline inspection.
She said the CPC will make greater efforts to improve the work style of the Party and carry on the fight against corruption.
The Party's efforts in this regard have been persistent. Accordingly, the level of satisfaction the Chinese people have felt about the fight against corruption has kept rising. A national survey conducted in 2001 showed that about 70 percent of those surveyed expressed satisfaction at the Party's anti-corruption campaign. The figure was 10 percentage points higher than that in 1996.
Over the past 13 years, the Party has strengthened system improvement and promoted the establishment of a supervision mechanism to ensure that both the root causes and consequences of corruption are dealt with.
In 1989 when Jiang Zemin became general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, he regarded anti-corruption as a matter of life and death for the Party and state. The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee made the decision to dissolve companies which disrupted market economic order.
A comprehensive program of improving the Party's work style and combating corruption was launched in August 1993 when the CPC Central Committee set guiding principles in this regard. Leading officials were required to be more self-disciplined, cases breaching Party rules or laws were investigated, and malpractices of Party and government departments were corrected.
In 1997, new rules that are intended to make leading Party officials clean and honest were promulgated.
System improvement is also seen in the selection of officials. A statute on appointing Party and government officials, published in July this year, makes the process of selecting officials more transparent.
At the opening session of the 16th National Congress of the CPC, Jiang Zemin said, "We must uphold and improve the leadership system and working mechanism against corruption and earnestly implement the responsibility system for improving the Party's work style and building a clean government, in a concerted effort to prevent and punish corruption."
Xing Yuanmin, a congress delegate from Chongqing Municipality in southwest China, said an anti-corruption system is well established and will further improve. "With Party members exerting greater efforts, I believe corruption will be contained to a greater extent," she said.
"Prevention should be the key to combating corruption and both the causes and consequences of corruption should be dealt with at the same time," Xing said, noting that the corruption of official sexists in many countries.
"The CPC's endeavor to punish corruptionists more severely and strengthen system improvement show that our Party is determined and able to deal with corruption and keep its members clean and honest," she said.
(Xinhua News Agency November 11, 2002)
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