China cracks down on 'naked officials'

Hundreds of Chinese Communist party officials in southern China have been forced to accept demotions after being caught up in President Xi Jinping's latest anti-graft campaign - a clampdown on "naked officials".

Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported at the weekend that Guangdong had found more than 1,000 cases of "naked officials" - the term for cadres whose spouses and children live overseas - in an investigation. It said 200 provincial employees had asked their families to return from overseas, while another 866 officials had agreed to accept demotions instead as punishment.

The "naked official" phenomenon has become synonymous with corruption in China, as people ask how officials on meagre government salaries can afford to support their family members overseas.

Many top party members, including Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Chongqing boss, have sent their children to study abroad, sparking popular resentment towards a perceived privilege and hypocrisy.

The focus on "naked officials" is the latest front in the campaign to stamp out corruption that Mr Xi launched after becoming head of the party in late 2012. He has vowed to attack graft by clamping down on "tigers and flies" - high-level and low-level officials - who are found to be corrupt. His biggest target is Zhou Yongkang, a powerful former member of the Politburo Standing Committee.

In tandem with his anti-graft campaign, Mr Xi has launched an austerity campaign to force party cadres to cut back opulent spending. It has hit sales of everything from the delicacy hairy crabs and baijiu , a fiery liquor favoured by officials, to expensive handbags, watches and Samsonite suitcases. Government employees have also been told to limit official banquets to "four dishes and one soup".

China's anti-corruption authorities first issued regulations in 1997 ordering cadres to disclose details of family members who had emigrated or were living abroad, and a reporting system was created in 2010 with little effect.

But Xinhua last month said the government had launched a "large-scale campaign to stamp out naked officials," with a focus on the wealth province of Guangdong in south China. Last week, Fang Xuan, the former deputy head of the party committee in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, became the highest-profile victim of the campaign, taking early retirement after a probe found that he was a "naked official".

The Guangdong probe found that the problem was "conspicuous" in Dongguan, a big manufacturing city that is crucial to the global supply chain. The metropolis was already reeling from a separate "anti-yellow" campaign to stamp out prostitution in what had become known in China as "sin city".

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