Study On Present Situation And Problems Of Asset Disclosure By Public Officials In China

Asset and income disclosure of public officers is uniformly considered to be an effective means of discouraging corruption. The task of combating corruption and building a clean government has been deepened in our country and institutional construction is the key of anti-corruption task. As a global anti-corruption issue to prevent and combat corruption, the disclosure of asset and income will be served as an essential component of the anti-corruption institutional system.China has been trying to take similar measures since the 1990s. In 1995, the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council jointly released a regulation requiring officials above the county level to report their income. And in 2001, the CPC released another regulation requiring officials above the provincial and ministerial level to report their family assets to the Party. Nevertheless without public oversight and effective enforcement the system had limited impact. Without the legislation for financial disclosure of public officers, the development of the system was thrown into a dilemma.With the rising of the political democracy in China, the corruption of public officials has been put more and more attention on. The legislation of asset declaration has been focused on. Some local governments have started trials in this regard in 2009. Under the background, I try to find out the influence factors which set back the institutional change and analyze the reasons of the dilemma by using the institutional change theory. I expect to propose countermeasures to eliminate the obstacles and promote the legislation and effective enforcement of the disclosure of asset and income.This paper is divided into 5 parts to explore the status and problems of asset disclosure by public officials in China. In Chapter 1, the author does a large number of research of the background, the purpose and elaborate the related theories for the institutional change, limited privacy of civil servants and financial disclosure including the history, factors, functions of the asset and income declaration. Chapter 2 describes the resent conditions of the properties declaration system of China as well as the trials started by local governments. Chapter 3 analyzes the causes of problems, including 3 influence factors:the government factor, the social culture factor, the related institutions environment. Chapter 4 specifically introduces the development history and present situation of the income declaration by public officials in USA which may do good to the reform in China. The final chapter provides some related countermeasures and suggestions, mainly from integrity culture construction, system promotion etc. At last, the author forecast the tendency and means of institutional change.