The committee at Houchen Village has monitored biddings for 25 construction projects and has held a hearing on a production facility valued at 10 million yuan (1.25 million U.S. dollars). It has helped the village save more than 900,000 yuan (112,500 U.S. dollars).

Some villagers said the former transparency system was simply to make public what the villagers' committee had done. Now every invoice and receipt are scrutinized, the villagers added.

Like Houchen, over 500 out of the 570 villages in Wuyi County have begun to practise the supervision system. Local government data showed that complaints in the county decreased by 32 percent last year.

Initiated in Wuyi County, the system has been popularized in Jinhua City, where the county is situated. Earlier this year, it won a nomination for the Third China Local Government Innovation Award, which was mainly sponsored by the Party School of CPC Central Committee and Beijing University.

After making a field research on the democratic supervision in Wuyi, Xi Jinping, secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of CPC, said, "The new system, based on the separation of supervision from administration, conforms to the development orientation of grassroots democracy in China."

Source: Xinhua