17 provincial transportation officials convicted in past eight years

The names of 17 Chinese provincial transportation officials from across the country convicted of corruption in the past eight years were listed at the top of China's section of the 2005 World Corruption Report published by Transparency International this month.

Bi Yuxi, the former deputy director of Beijing Communication Bureau, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve -- essentially life in prison -- on March 16 for taking 10 million yuan (1.2 million dollars) in bribes and embezzling three million yuan (361,446 US dollars) in state-owned assets.

Before that 16 directors of provincial transportation departments in 10 provinces had been convicted since 1997, along with hundreds of corrupted transportation officials of lower ranks.

The frequent disclosure of corruption cases in transportation departments have aroused a lot of attention from the public and the country's media, which contributed to this unusual phenomenon to the country's rapid transport infrastructure development and the lack of effective supervision mechanism.

China has invested more than 1.7 trillion yuan in its highway infrastructure since 1998, nearly twice of the total of the previous 40 years. The total length of China's expressways, just 10,000 kilometers in 1999, reached 34,000 km by the end of 2004, ranking second in the world.

The huge influx of money into the sector brought China not only thousands of expressways and railways, but also hundreds of corrupt officials, especially those in charge of transportation projects. Most have been sentenced to long-term prison sentences or death for taking huge bribes.

Chinese media have shown that many of those corrupted officials were once honest but became crooked after becoming heads of transportation departments.

Most of China's transportation infrastructure projects are funded, built and supervised by local governments, meaning that investors, builders and supervisors practically belong to the same department.

"In such circumstances, without effective supervision, it is not strange for those in charge of the project to pocket several million from the total cost of several billion yuan," said an official working in transportation department for 30 years, who declined to be named.

The power to easily handle huge money made transportation officials dominators of the government-funded construction projects, which has become a hotbed with most serious bribery scandals in China.

Local transportation directors usually have rights to decide the project builder, although the projects should be arranged through public bidding according to laws, the official said.

"The builders still have to bribe local officials to receive final approval," he said.

Critics here have said these corruption cases prove it urgent to highlight a supervision mechanism based on a scientific division among investors, builders and supervisors.

Ju Jinwen, professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the monopoly of the government department is the major reason for the rampant corruption of the country's transportation officials.

He said that the only way to ultimately resolve the problem is to introduce market-orientated investment and management system to state-funded transportation projects.

"China's transportation infrastructure market should be more opened to private and foreign investors, and more severe judicial means should be introduced to control the construction quality," Ju said.

Source: Xinhua