Economic crimes committed by village heads, the lowest-ranking officials in China, have increased in recent years, bringing forth new challenges in the nation's anti-corruption endeavors, a law expert said.
Wang Jianxin, an expert with the Law School of the Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics in eastern Jiangxi Province, recently finished a survey of village officials' abuse of power and related economic crimes.
Wang said amid China's fight against corruption by high-ranking officials, corrupt grassroots officials have cropped up in a big quantity. Such cases involved bribes valued at thousands, tens and even hundreds of thousands of yuan.
Economically developed eastern Zhejiang Province reported 55 cases of embezzlement by village cadres in 2003. In Haidong Prefecture of northwestern Qinghai Province, seven cases involving 11 village heads were investigated and prosecuted between 2002 and 2003. Five years earlier, however, there were no such crimes at the village-level in the region, according to Wang's survey.
Song Yexian, former Party head of Longgang Village in eastern Anhui Province, was recently sentenced to three years' imprisonment for illegally dividing up 31,000 yuan (US$3,735) in public funds with other village committee members. Song's crime also included a bribe valued at 10,000 yuan.
Song was an orphan brought up by the villagers. He was named "No. 1 village head" in Anhui for his outstanding achievements. He was instrumental in setting up a village-owned company, and led his village to rank first, for six consecutive years, in terms of overall strength among the province's villages.
Prior to this, Jin Mingchi, committee head of Dali Village in Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan Province, embezzled 2 million yuan.
A worse corruption case was reported in southwestern Guizhou Province, involving 10 million yuan in state-owned capital. The money was appropriated by a village committee as a whole.
Wang said corrupt village officials accumulated wealth by various illegal means, like making fraudulent claims, illegally possessing compensation for land use and funds for construction projects and selling off public properties.
Though their ranks were low, the money they embezzled was as much as their high-ranking peers. The punishment for such corrupt lower officials was not light, said Wang.
The fast increase in village-level corruption was ascribed by Wang Kaiyu, a noted researcher with Anhui Academy of Social Sciences, to the patriarchal behavior of grassroots officials and their almost unlimited power against poor awareness of law amongst the villagers.
He said the absence of a supervision system for village committees also accounted for the crime rise. At present, no special organs have been set up to supervise the daily work of village committees, nor is there an audit system.