19,000 village officials have been investigated in first quarter of this year, according to Central Commission for Discipline Inspection
Beijing has further tightened its management of rural government workers with revised anti-corruption supervision rules for grass-roots officials.
The changes mean that after more than a decade of anti-corruption campaigns, China’s system for supervising rural officials has finally been defined, according to one scholar.
The revised Regulations on the Honest Performance of Duties by Rural Grass-roots Officials came into force on March 28, state news agency Xinhua reported last week.
The document was jointly issued by the Central Office of the Communist Party and the General Office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, and is the first revision of the rules since they were made known in 2011.
The new regulations significantly expand the number of grass-roots officials subject to disciplinary supervision to include township cadres, village officials and officials sent to rural areas as part of President Xi Jinping’s massive poverty alleviation campaign.
Under China’s village committee organisation law, villagers have the right to elect their village chief by universal suffrage. This position, which wields considerable power in the village, is the lowest level of party leadership but is not part of the civil service system.
Villagers can also elect officials to form a committee to run their village and decide some village affairs by vote.
China’s anti-corruption authorities have repeatedly said that supervising these officials is a challenge because most are neither party members nor civil servants.
The new regulations say “major decisions, major project agreements and the use of large sums of money” in villages must be reported to the township party committee and higher levels of government.
The new rules also stipulate that village officials found guilty of “disciplinary violations” – a euphemism for corruption – will be publicly named just as with senior officials, and if they are found to have committed “major violations” their cases will be reviewed by higher-level disciplinary inspection authorities.
China’s top corruption hunter, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said on Tuesday that 19,000 village officials had been investigated in the first three months of this year.
More than 500 million people live in villages, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Xi launched the “targeted poverty alleviation” campaign in November 2013, vowing to improve living standards in rural areas. He then declared victory in the fight against “absolute poverty” in early 2021.
At the 2017 party congress, Xi said agriculture and rural issues were the party’s “fundamental task” as Beijing launched a new “rural revitalisation” campaign.
Zheng Linyi, a researcher at the China Academy for Rural Development at Zhejiang University, said the revised regulations meant the regulatory system for rural officials had finally “taken shape”.
“In recent years, the state and society have poured a lot of capital into rural revitalisation, and we need to make sure that every penny is spent wisely,” Zheng said.
He added that the new regulations further emphasised accountability, which would “help build a high-quality team of grass-roots officials who are honest and self-disciplined”.
Zheng said he did not expect the new regulations to demoralise rural officials.
“If grass-roots governance is based on serving the private interests of village officials, the countryside will be in a dangerous state. It is necessary to protect good officials, restrain bad ones and guide grass-roots governance in the right direction,” Zheng said.
Senior Chinese officials have repeatedly stressed the need to strengthen control over rural areas in recent years. Xi has warned that weak party control over the countryside could undermine social stability.
The most notable case of social instability occurred in the coastal village of Wukan, in the southern province of Guangdong. In 2016, Lin Zuluan, the village chief elected by villagers, was sentenced to 37 months in prison on corruption charges, sparking protests that were eventually put down by local police.
Five years earlier, in 2011, Wukan had gained notoriety for villagers’ protests against officials and developers over land grabs. After the initial unrest ended, officials resigned and villagers elected Lin as their new leader.
Beijing has also repeatedly called for the punishment of family clans and gangs with roots in rural areas, demanding that local governments prevent them from “undermining the grass-roots political system”.
At the same time, however, Beijing does not want to mute the enthusiasm of rural officials at a time when they say they are overwhelmed by the heavy workload associated with poverty alleviation.
The central government has already introduced measures to reduce the number of meetings attended by grass-roots officials and to crack down on “formalism” in a bid to ease their workload.
The new anti-corruption regulations have called for the “clarification and rehabilitation of rural grass-roots officials who have been falsely reported or wrongly accused”.
They also included the establishment of a “follow-up mechanism” to guide punished rural officials to “correctly understand their mistakes, put aside their burdens and work actively, transforming themselves from ‘having made mistakes’ to ‘being able to achieve results’.”
