The national official accountability system needs to be further improved, says an article in Workers' Daily. An excerpt follows:

North China's Hebei Province recently released a document detailing the cases for the resignation of a number of officials.

According to the document, local government and Party officials, whose dereliction of duty, violation of regulations or unsound decision-making have led to misappropriation of State assets and serious financial losses in relation to important projects, should acknowledge their mistakes and resign their positions in line with specified procedures.

Many other provinces have drawn up similar regulations as part of an official accountability system. Their resolution to crack down on misbehaving government and Party officials is worthy of praise. But resignation itself is not the end of the story.

Can officials that resign or are dismissed be appointed to other posts? This question deserves to be discussed.

A complete set of regulations concerning the accountability of officials is pivotal to China's political structure. Officials should be dismissed or resign because of their inability to perform their duties.

But in many cases dismissed officials are reappointed because they have improved their performance, and sometimes even if they have not.

As a result the credibility of reappointed officials is inevitably called into question by the public.

This is because there are no clear criteria against which post-dismissal behaviour can be measured, and there are no specific stipulations in relevant regulations on the conditions under which dismissed officials may be reappointed.

A well-designed official accountability system and a transparent reappointment procedure will surely help prevent shady dealing and dispel the public's distrust of rehabilitated officials.

(China Daily 07/05/2005 page4)