According to a report in China Youth Daily last week, the Communist Party of China's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) has decided to continue a pilot monitoring the movements of officials' families to help prevent corruption.

The Central Committee of Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League, which proposed the motion, said that the number of government officials and state-owned enterprise leaders fleeing abroad with huge sums of money has risen in recent years, so being aware of their moves is essential to detecting corruption.

The CCDI has been recording officials' travel plans and their children's job applications since July in Xiangfang in Hubei Province, Shuozhou in Shanxi Province and at two big enterprises in Beijing.

"We will accumulate experience from the pilot and formulate next steps," an official from the CCDI was quoted as saying.

Anti-corruption experts have found a general modus operandi for fugitive officials: they first search for an ideal destination in the name of overseas work, then send relatives there and transfer money to them before finally fleeing themselves.

"The number of corrupt officials who run overseas has increased since 2000, the year Hu Changqing, former vice governor of Jiangxi Province, was sentenced to death for corruption," said Wang Minggao, a professor at Hunan University and leader of a state-funded anti-corruption strategy research program.

Though the government has not disclosed the number of corrupt officials who have fled overseas, Jia Chunwang, procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, said 596 fugitive corrupt officials were brought back in 2003.

(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2005)