BEIJING, March 8 (UPI) -- A one time Communist Party up-and-comer was executed in China in a clear warning to senior officials that the net against corruption is closing on the government's highest ranks.
The state-run Xinhua news agency reported Wednesday that the former vice governor of east China's Jiangxi province, Hu Changqing, was executed Tuesday in the provincial capital, Nanchang.
Analysts believe that the timing of the execution was politically motivated to send a signal to millions of Communist Party members. The country's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress is having its annual meeting this week. The 3,000 or so delegates have been warned in no uncertain terms that corruption is an offense that will be prosecuted.
Hu is the most senior party leader to be executed as China steps up its graft-busting campaign.
The execution is a calculated warning to his former peers that the "big tigers" of corruption among officials will be targeted. Until recently a senior position in the Communist Party guaranteed immunity from the ultimate punishment but that is no longer the case. Only a decade ago prosecutions among the party's rank and file were rare but now they are common, reflecting the spread of corruption and the pressure from the masses on the government to clean-up its act.
Hu was found guilty of accepting more than $650,000 in bribes while holding senior government positions. The Xinhua report said that as Jiangxi vice governor and deputy director of the cabinet's Administration of Religious Affairs between May 1995 and August 1999, Hu had accepted bribes totaling 5.44 million yuan ($657,200).
Nanchang People's Court sentenced Hu to death in February and the highest appeal body, the Supreme People's Court rejected his appeal Tuesday. The Chinese prime minister made a bitter attack on corruption at the opening of the Congress Sunday.
"We still fall far short of what the central authorities require of us and what the people expect of us," Zhu said in his speech to NPC delegates in the Great Hall of the People.
"Government functionaries at all levels, in particular leading cadres should stay clean and honest and self-disciplined and be sure that their relatives and office staff do the same."
The congress has been rocked by the revelation that a senior member of its permanent staff had been sacked after anti-corruption investigators opened an investigation into alleged incidents of bribery while he was a provincial official.
"Vice chairman of the NPC standing committee Cheng Kejie is now under investigation for taking bribes," congress spokesman Zeng Jianhui said.
The Chinese leadership has become increasingly obsessed with the fight against corruption, which has spread throughout the system despite a series of mass campaigns in the past decade to staunch the spread of graft. So far this year two huge smuggling rackets been uncovered in which Communist officials ran goods worth more than $30 billion through the eastern ports of Xiamen and Shantou.NEWLN:
