Reform will make officials efficient

China's unprecedented campaign against corruption is aimed at facilitating administrative reforms, which, in turn, will help implement the basic principle of the Constitution that "all power belongs to the people". The anti-corruption campaign, however, is also said to have lowered the efficiency levels of some government officials.

Some say this is the price society has to pay for China's transition from an economy based on administrative norms and approval procedures to a market-based economy. The measures to simplify the administrative procedures or to transfer them from government departments to the market, they say, have caused many benefits previously enjoyed by government officials to disappear. And the resultant grievance among government officials has made them less efficient.

Such analyses, which link the anti-corruption drive to officials' inefficiency, are absurd.