The municipal government of Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu
Province, issued a controversial regulation on April 22
requiring officials to report extramarital affairs, believing it
would curb corruption.
Zhuo Zeyuan, a professor at the Politics and Law Department of
the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said the
system would help put officials under public supervision, but that
reporting should not infringe on the rights of officials'
spouses.
According to the Marriage Law revision expert panel, 95 percent
of convicted corrupt officials had extramarital lovers; in the
southern cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai, this included
all the officials involved in the 102 corruption cases investigated
in 1999.
The regulation also gives the government permission to intervene
in the relationship if the official's family stability is thought
to have been affected, though the precise criteria for deciding
when this had happened were not reported.
Mo Jihong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences' Institute of Law Science, said the rule violates privacy
and Marriage Law, which states that citizens should enjoy freedom
of marriage and divorce.
Mo said it is also unrealistic, since no one would voluntarily
speak out about their extramarital affairs.
Wang Lei, associate professor at Peking University's Law School,
argued that civil servants, especially senior ones, could not enjoy
full privacy because their posts bring them too much power. If they
failed to disclose enough personal information, the public would
fear that they were not being supervised.
Last year, a national anti-corruption research group suggested
central government establish a public account for officials to
return bribes, after five-year-long research on a corruption
prevention and control strategy.
In 2003 and 2004, 13 and 16 ministerial-level officials
respectively were imprisoned for taking bribes.
The CPC in 2004 published its first internal supervision
regulations since 1949 to intensify the country's anti-graft
campaign.
The 47-article Regulations of Internal Supervision of the
Communist Party of China put all 68 million Party members under
rigid public supervision.
(Xinhua News Agency April 20, 2005)