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New media helping public report official misbehavior

Xinhua, February 4, 2016 Adjust font size:

New media is proving to be an effective tool in gathering public tip-offs about official corruption and extravagance, data from China's anti-graft agency has showed.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) has been expanding channels for the public to blow the whistle on misbehaving officials -- it now has a website, a mobile application and an account with popular social messaging service WeChat for this purpose.

The CCDI got 128,000 tip-offs via its website and mobile app in 2015, up 13 percent year on year, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The agency also received 16,000 tips through WeChat after the account was put into operation on Jan. 1.

Based on those reports, the CCDI transferred more than 5,000 cases to inspectors last year, and "a batch" of officials were punished as a result, said the statement, without unveiling the exact number involved.

Among them was Wang Cizhao, principal of the Central Conservatory of Music, who was handed a formal warning for taking advantage of his position to hold a wedding for his daughter.

Other violations spotted by the public included dining out on the public purse, private trips funded with government money and private use of public service vehicles.

To ensure tip-offs can be made anonymously, whistle-blowers through the CCDI's new media channels get an automatically generated unique code for them to inquire about the handling of their reports.

The agency also ordered staff to process the information within an intranet and vowed to severely punish anyone leaking it.

A large number of the tips, however, are invalid either because they were filed repetitively, too vague to verify, or exceed the CCDI's jurisdiction, the statement said.

The CCDI encouraged the public to provide the violator's name, work unit, as well as the time and place of the violation. It said it would also like informants to take photos of officials' misbehavior and upload them through the watchdog's three new media channels.

Since late 2012, when the CPC's big frugality campaign and crackdown on corruption began, more than 130,000 officials have been reprimanded, including 29,000 in the first 11 months of 2015. Endi