Authorities scrap asset-disclosure trial programs, Beijing News says

President Xi Jinping

Chinese authorities abandoned almost half of 30 trial programs aimed at requiring local officials to disclose their assets in the last five years, the Beijing News newspaper said yesterday.
The paper found 13 areas scrapped the disclosure experiments, including one in central Hunan province where questions arose over an official who owned a property that was almost 1,000 square meters in size, according to the newspaper. Almost all of the trials were at county, city, or district level, it said.
Asset disclosure is politically sensitive in China after a series of high-profile corruption cases and reports about the wealth of the families of top leaders. President Xi Jinping is driving a campaign against corruption after warning graft threatened the future of the ruling Communist Party, including investigating former security czar Zhou Yongkang.
Authorities have cracked down on people demanding greater transparency of officials’ wealth and exposing wrongdoing online. Chinese courts sentenced activists such as legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, who sought asset disclosure by top officials, and reined in online commentary on the subject.
Officials in China aren’t required to publicly give details of their financial holdings. A 2008 report by the People’s Bank of China that was later deleted estimated that since the mid-1990s as many as 18,000 corrupt officials had taken roughly 800 billion yuan (USD130 billion) overseas.
The Beijing News found that in 2009 a county in Hunan started to reveal the assets of 69 officials, including details of the property they owned, leading locals to question how a township level official could have a nearly 1,000 square-meter property. The program was stopped after causing some “contradiction” and “disputes,” the paper said, citing an unnamed local discipline inspection official.
In Altay prefecture in northwestern Xinjiang province, the assets of 1,054 officials were disclosed in 2009. The program was stopped after an official from the regional discipline inspection committee died, the Beijing News said.
The paper said that of the 30 trial areas it studied, officials from nine didn’t answer the phone within three days, and a further nine were busy or said they weren’t clear on the situation and couldn’t do interviews.
Bloomberg News reported in 2012 that President Xi’s extended family had business interests in minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment. Relatives of former Premier Wen Jiabao had controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion, the New York Times reported the same year. Bloomberg