At its pivotal 20th national congress, the Communist Party of China (CPC), the world's largest Marxist governing party, highlighted self-reform as the key to consolidating its position as the long-term governing party.
Through full and rigorous self-governance, the Party has boosted its ability to purify, improve, renew and excel itself, maintaining the people's support in a country with 1.4 billion people.
As it leads efforts to build China into a great modern socialist country, the CPC has pledged to continue full and rigorous self-governance and to steer broader social transformation through its self-reform.
STRENGTHENING OVERSIGHT
The Party congress in October emphasized that the CPC is the highest force of political leadership and that upholding the centralized, unified leadership of the Party Central Committee is the highest political principle.
It also underlined the importance of concrete, targeted and regular political oversight.
This aims to ensure that the central leadership's key plans and arrangements spanning economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological spheres, among others, are fully and precisely implemented by its 4.9 million grassroots-level organizations and over 96 million members.
In the country's unprecedented fight against poverty over the past decade, these closely-knit organizations have played a key role in helping nearly 100 million rural residents shake off poverty.
In the tourist city of Guilin in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, political inspections have served as a powerful tool in the conservation of the picturesque landscape. A task force has been established to supervise the protection of the Lijiang River, which flows through the city.
Accountability mechanisms have real teeth in Guilin. During the first nine months of 2022, the city's discipline watchdog investigated 53 cases of corruption and misconduct in environmental protection work, and initiated disciplinary action against 80 individuals.
In Zhejiang Province's Huzhou City, issues that are important to people's lives are overseen to ensure that people's basic needs are fulfilled.
Supervisors have been targeting project construction and the use of funds related to rural old-age care and child care services to ensure that the residents can enjoy quality services as the city strives for common prosperity, said Wang Yong, deputy secretary of the Huzhou Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC.
FIGHTING CORRUPTION
The Party considers corruption a tumor threatening its very health. It has vowed to unswervingly continue its anti-corruption efforts as long as the breeding grounds and conditions for such illegal practices exist.
Amid a sweeping anti-corruption battle since 2012, a total of 553 officials registered at and supervised by the CPC Central Committee have been investigated, along with more than 25,000 officials at the department and bureau level and over 182,000 at the county and division level.
An overwhelming victory has been achieved and the gains in the fight against corruption have been fully consolidated, said the report to the 20th CPC National Congress, in which the Party pledged intensified efforts to uproot corruption in sectors with a high concentration of power, funds and resources.
"The report set clear requirements for our anti-corruption work," said Pan Feng, a member of the standing committee of the Qinghai Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC.
The province has launched a campaign to combat graft in the grain purchasing and sales sector, where offenses committed by corrupt officials are hard to identify.
So far, a total of 82 individuals have been placed under investigation, with 22.4 million yuan (3.2 million U.S. dollars) of illicit funds recovered.
The Party's anti-graft drive has won widespread trust from the people. According to a survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics at the end of 2020, 95.8 percent of the Chinese people had full confidence in strict Party self-governance and curbing corruption.
While maintaining a tough stance on corruption, the CPC has committed itself to improving conduct. Significant advances have been made since the central Party leadership's eight-point decision on improving conduct was unveiled in 2012. Undesirable conduct such as indulgence in extravagance and ostentation has been curbed within the whole Party.
Noting that good conduct is critical to the survival of a governing party, the report vowed to continue to tackle pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance, and root out privilege-seeking mindsets and behavior.
Tenzin Dondrup, vice general manager of a construction materials company in the Tibet Autonomous Region, said that the fight against corruption and misconduct has exposed low-ranking corrupt officials who directly affect people's livelihood, winning broad public support for the Party.
IMPROVING SYSTEMS, REGULATIONS
The report stressed running the Party with systems and regulations and improving the framework of Party regulations.
The Party has attached great importance to developing intra-Party regulations since 2012. Consequently, a sound system of Party regulations has taken shape, with approximately 4,000 intra-Party regulations currently in effect, of which over 70 percent have been enacted or revised in the past decade.
The vitality of the system lies in its implementation, said Qiao Beihua, a judge with the Second Intermediate People's Court of Shanghai who is a delegate to the 20th CPC National Congress, adding that priority should be given to the enforcement of intra-Party regulations to give full play to their efficiency.
Regulation-based self-governance has been implemented at the primary level. In the city of Siping, Jilin Province, a team of experts and grassroots officials has been commissioned to visit 144 villages and speak directly with farmers to learn about the conservation of black soil, which is largely found in northeast China and produces about a quarter of the country's total grain output.
After two months of hard work, an oversight plan for black soil conservation was formulated, providing a strong institutional basis for local supervisory authorities to carry out their work.
"Going ahead, we will continue implementing effective ways to handle cases, and strictly punish those violating black soil protection regulations," said Wang Yandong, secretary of the Siping Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC.
