Government and Policy

Morality rules spark debate on official conduct

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-07-23 14:51

BEIJING - Local officials in an east China county are finding their love lives are a matter of public concern in a new requirement for them to meet "morality" standards.

Not only will extramarital affairs possibly ruin their careers -- they will also find their relations with their parents, children and neighbors under scrutiny.

The new morality standards have been imposed on 96 local government and Communist Party of China (CPC) officials in Shuyang County, Jiangsu Province.

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Their records of marital fidelity, filial piety, parenting and good neighborliness will be included in their biannual performance assessments.

Personal morality would be assessed through interviews, home visits, investigations and public submissions, said Wang Xiaodong, head of Shuyang's CPC organization department.

Any evidence of immoral conduct would earn them demerit points, Wang said.

Officials should set moral examples and a failure to do so could bring the whole system of local government into disrepute, said Jiang Jianming, Shuyang Party chief.

Jiang said bad examples in the past had resulted in the new rules. He cited an on-line report about a male official in Shuyang who had repeatedly sent vulgar text messages to his female colleagues.

Other local administrations, such as Xinle City, in north China's Hebei Province, already include marital relations in performance assessments of officials.

Integrity was not just a matter of work performance, but also personal bearing, Zhao Hongbo, official of Xinle's CPC organization department, told The People's Daily newspaper in April.

China's central discipline authorities have been drawing a direct link between personal morality and corruption.

In more than 95 percent of the major corruption cases handled by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the convicted officials were found to have extramarital lovers, Guangzhou Daily quoted former CCDI official Qi Peiwen, as saying in 2009.

"I think such regulations are necessary," said Tian Xianfeng, Shuyang's police chief. "If we can find signs of corruption through routine checks, we can deal with them as early as possible."

However, the new rules have become a matter of public debate.

They were unrealistic with little practical value, said Professor He Bing, of China University of Political Science and Law.

"Officials in foreign countries also take the consequences, such as resignation or impeachment, if they commit moral mistakes. But how can love affairs be disclosed in a routine check?" He argued.

"And if they were actually found, the officials should be punished in accordance with the law and Party discipline, not just with a demerit point," He said.

A better way to fight corruption would be more stringent efforts to supervise the use of public funds and requirements for officials to report their personal declarable assets, He said.

Excessive and abusive investigations into the marital situations of officials would possibly constitute an infringement of privacy, He said.

Tian Xiangbo, a researcher with Hunan University's Research Center for Clean Governance, disagreed: "The limits of officials' privacy should not be the same as that of ordinary people. Officials are obliged to disclose some of their personal affairs for the sake of the public interest."

Tian also called for discretion regarding marriage problems, as marital failure was not necessarily an indicator of professional competence.

The debate has since spilled into the Internet.

"So how about the loving couples who take bribes together?" asked a posting from "Laodage" on qq.com.

"I wonder whether this regulation can be effectively carried out, but at least it is better than nothing," said a posting on tieba.baidu.com, the on-line forum hosted by China's largest domestic search engine.

A revised regulation, issued by the General Office of China's State Council and the General Office of the CPC Central Committee on July 11, asked Chinese officials to report some of their personal information such as marital relations and personal assets as well as those of their families, in a move to curb corruption and increase transparency.

However, the new regulation did not make clear how detailed the marital relation reports should be, an anti-graft official in Beijing told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.