About 2,100 officials were punished for misconduct during the latest round of local leadership reshuffles from January last year to this January, a senior anti-corruption official said yesterday.

Of them, 1,948 were reprimanded and 163 received administrative punishment such as suspension, demotion or removal from posts, Zhang Jinan, a standing committee member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), told a national meeting.

Zhang said the violators were involved in 1,885 cases of malpractice including election bribery or buying posts.

He did not disclose how many of them had been transferred for prosecution.

"We cannot let these opportunists benefit from trickery while the honest lose out," Zhang said.

He said the CCDI, jointly with the CPC Central Committee's Organization Department, had made corruption-free elections a major objective after reshuffles started in 2006 at the provincial, city, county and township CPC party organs, governments, people's congresses and advisory bodies.

Zhang said the two departments had warned officials against corruption to create "a clean environment for elections".

Since 2006, the CCDI and the Organization Department have made public 34 cases of illegal activities during local leadership reshuffles, including those involving vice-governor of Shaanxi Li Tangtang and former assistant governor of Hebei Li Junqu.

Li Tangtang received a severe inner-Party reprimand for sending messages to eight people in the provincial government asking them to vote for him; and Li Junqu was removed from the post for winning support by holding banquets and giving gifts, according to previous CCDI reports.

However, according to a CCDI report released yesterday, 95.4 percent of some 30,000 deputies to local people's congresses and members of local CPPCC committees who responded to a survey said the local elections and reshuffles were "clean".

Zhang said the public played a critical role in supervising the officials by reporting malpractices through the "12380" hotline, e-mails and letters.

(China Daily March 26, 2008)