China punished 97,260 members of Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2006, a result of a continuous campaign to fight graft and build a "clean" Party, the Party's discipline watchdog announced on Tuesday.

Gan Yisheng, vice secretary of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), said that the case files of 3,530 members had been handed over to prosecutors, including seven officials at or above the governor and minister level.

Gan said more than 80 percent of Party members who were punished violated regulations on the administration of public affairs and Party finances. Many also took bribes and were found to be in dereliction of duty, he said.

Gan said members who failed to abide by the Party's rules or made mistakes only accounted for 0.14 percent of the Party's 70 million members. "The ratio is very low, which means most of the Party cadres are clean," Gan said.

China's widely publicized anti-graft fight has led to the downfall of a number of high-profile officials in recent months, including Shanghai's former Party chief Chen Liangyu, who was also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.

Gan said the investigation of Chen's case "is going smoothly" and the CCDI's results will be publicized at the appropriate time.

"The Party's Central Committee's decision and clear-cut stand in investigating and handling Chen Liangyu's case demonstrates that no matter how high position a person holds, if they go against Party discipline and the law, they will be investigated and severely punished. And this is by no means idle talk," Gan said.

Gan refuted a rumor that Chen possessed stocks worth 300 million yuan, calling it "groundless."

There were 1,269 appointed or elected Party officials were found to have taken bribes or other forms of securities worth a total of 54.48 million yuan (US$7 million), Gan said.

The Party found that 5,754 had gambled and 45 had gambled in overseas casinos.

"In 2006, we discovered crooked cadres in the regions we had long considered to be clean, and we made progress in several investigations where there has been a lot of complaints," he said, noting that 46.2 percent of the probes were initiated from public petitions.

Petitions have led to the downfall of a number of high ranking officials including Jin Fusheng, former Party public relations chief in Fujian Province, Wang Wulong, former deputy chairman of Jiangsu provincial people's congress and He Minxu, former deputy governor of Anhui Province, said Gan at Tuesday's news conference.

The Party's discipline watchdog also cleared 29,379 CPC members of wrongful accusations.

(Xinhua News Agency February 13, 2007)