Stimulus well spent
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If this is the whole and true picture of fraud in the execution of the government's mammoth stimulus package, we can say it is very good news.
At its Thursday briefing, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) of the Communist Party of China (CPC) said it found 88 cases of wrongdoing involving the 4-trillion-yuan package to stimulate domestic demand, involving 198 party members.
Given that those are findings from three rounds of inspections they have conducted, and that there are thousands of local governments across the country, such figures are indeed very, very small. So small that we wonder whether society has been overly exaggerating corruption by our public servants.
Most of us share the impression that whenever and wherever there was public money, there was abuse. And the country's persistent struggle against corruption over the decades only corroborated that perception. In a recent poll conducted by the People's Daily website, respondents identified corruption as the country's top challenge in the next decade.
Considering the CPC discipline watchdog's well-known prowess in carrying out its duties, we would rather believe we have been wrong, or that those otherwise abusive officials have chosen to behave under pressure of tighter oversight. After all, the CPC discipline watchdog has a name for its effectiveness in finding out what it seriously wants to know.
The unexpected rarity of misdeeds inspires us to hope the CCDI will maintain such effectiveness in regulating public servants, who are at the same time CPC members, and in safeguarding public money.
To our pleasant surprise, the CCDI not only relieved us of previous worries about the safety of the 4 trillion yuan. It even assured us of the way it is being utilized. That is actually a bigger concern on our part. We have always thought 4 trillion yuan may result in the wrong kind of demand if it is spent in the wrong places. The consequences of that would be much nastier than greedy officials embezzling a couple million.
But the CCDI report rendered all our suspicions unwarranted. After three rounds of inspections, it found no central money invested in energy-intensive, high-polluting or other unwanted programs. The most feared scenarios on our part, including money ending up churning out repetitive or redundant production capacities, worsening already serious problems in our industrial structure and product mix, have not occurred. Good to know that has not happened.
We only hope the CCDI's so-far-so-good picture is and continues to be true throughout and, most ideally, beyond the 4-trillion-yuan package.
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