While continuing to crack down on corrupt officials, the Communist Party of China (CPC), the sole leading party in the country, will establish a system to regulate the use of power to "gradually eradicate the soil that generates corruption," according to the decision of a top CPC meeting.

Monday's meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, chaired by General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Hu Jintao, analyzed current anti-graft measures, arranged anti-graft work in 2005 and deliberated on the guidelines for "building and improving a system to punish and prevent corruption through promoting education, in strict compliance with regulations and supervision."

To facilitate construction of the system, CPC leaders called for continued reform of the practices of cadres appointment, the justice system, the administrative approval mechanism and systems of finance, taxation, banking, investment and the management and supervision of state assets.

"Speeding up the establishment of such a system constitutes a major strategic anti-graft decision of the CPC Central Committee in the current stage," notes the decision. The program for implementation adopted at the meeting is the "guidelines of anti-graft work of today and a period to come," it says.

Analysts here said the CPC took a number of substantial steps in building such a system in 2004, including beefing up Party disciplines, reforming the way secretaries of Party committees are selected, regularly sending inspectors around the country and defining the scope of power of the government through a licensing law.

Last month, the secretary of the CPC Municipal Committee of Wuxi, a medium-size city in east China's Jiangsu province, was chosen by a vote of the 61-member CPC Jiangsu Provincial Committee. In the past, such decisions were made only by a few senior CPC provincial leaders.

"This will ensure that the most qualified person, a person of moral integrity and outstanding capability and accepted by the majority of people instead of just a few, is chosen to take an important post," said Li Min, director of a research office under the CPC Jiangsu Provincial Committee.

"A stitch in time saves nine. It's more cost effective to prevent rather than fight corruption," said Li Peilin, a noted researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China cracked 36,509 corruption cases involving a total of 42,225 people in the first 11 months of 2004, leading to the retrieval of 3.83 billion yuan (approximately 461.45 million US dollars) of direct economic loss.

Such economic losses and penalty of officials would be avoided if unhealthy tendencies were found in the earlier stage, said analysts.