Du Shicheng, vice-secretary of Shandong Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), has been sacked for "serious discipline violation".

Du was also suspended from the post of secretary of the Qingdao Municipal CPC Committee in Shandong, an economically developed region in east China.

Yan Qijun, president of the Shangdong federation of trade unions, has been appointed new party chief of the booming coastal city of Qingdao.

The CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection is investigating into Du's case. The commission found clues of Du's malpractice after receiving reports from the public during an official routine inspection.

Du was born in March 1950 in Longkou, Shandong and joined the CPC in December 1972.

The economically booming Shandong's gross domestic product (GDP), which ranked the second place in the country only after the southern Guangdong Province, reached to 1.02 trillion yuan (127.5 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of 2006, a year-on-year growth of 15.3 percent.

Qingdao, a regional international shipping center in Shandong, is the country's second largest foreign trade port and a co-host city of the 2008 Olympic Games. The port's throughput is expected to exceed 200 million tons this year, ranking Qingdao one of the world's top ten ports.

The city is also headquarters of some renowned Chinese brands such as appliance manufacturer "Haier" and the "Tsingtao Beer".

Du's sacking is another signal of the central government's hard stand against official malpractice and corruption.

Earlier this month, Beijing's former vice mayor Liu Zhihua, who was sacked in June for corruption, has been expelled from the CPC.

In September, the sacking of Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu for alleged involvement in a social security fund scandal, has become the country's highest-ranking official to fall in the latest anti-corruption campaign.

Later, Qiu Xiaohua, former statistics chief, was removed from the National Bureau of Statistics for his suspected involvement in the 10 billion-yuan (1.25 billion U.S. dollars) Shanghai social security fund fraud.

In 2005, 115,000 party members received disciplinary punishment, accounting for 0.16 percent of the party's total.

Among them, 11,071 had been expelled from the party, of which 7,279 had been transferred to the judicial authorities for criminal investigations.

Source: Xinhua