Crackdown called a 'serious practice', not temporary

An official from China's top advisory body is under investigation for alleged corruption, the country's top anti-graft agency announced on Friday.

Yang Gang, deputy director of the Committee for Economic Affairs of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, is suspected of committing "serious law and discipline violations", according to the Communist Party of China Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

The commission gave no further details.

Yang, 60, is also the former vice-minister of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, a position he held from December 2010 to July this year. He took on the role of deputy director of the Committee for Economic Affairs of the CPPCC National Committee in March.

Before 2010, Yang worked in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region for 41 years. He was Party chief of the region's capital of Urumqi from 1999 to 2006 and deputy Party chief of the autonomous region from November 2006 to December 2010.

From 2002 to 2012, Yang was a candidate member of the CPC Central Committee, which has 205 members and around 170 candidate members who are mostly officials at or above the ministerial level.

The Party watchdog also announced on Thursday that Qi Pingjing, former deputy head of the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration, has been expelled from the Party and removed from his position.

The anti-graft body said Qi had embezzled public funds and abused his position to create benefits for his relatives' businesses.

Qi's profits from his illegal behavior will be confiscated and his case will be transferred to judicial authorities, according to the commission.

A total of 25,855 officials have been punished as of Nov 30 for violating clean-governance rules since the CPC Central Committee put forward the "eight-point" rules in early December last year, the commission said.

The "eight-point" rules require government officials to lead a frugal life and clean up undesirable work styles such as formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance.

In a survey released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on Friday, about 73.7 percent of people are confident that the government will be effective in rooting out corruption over the next five years.

Li Qiufang, an official from the anti-graft commission, said at a clean-governance forum on Friday that the agency will establish a mechanism to clean up undesirable work styles and keep government expenses on a tight budget.

"The anti-corruption campaign will not be a wind that blows away quickly, but a serious practice that aims to eradicate corruption," she said.

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(China Daily 12/28/2013 page4)