Property Sector Corruption Addressed

Since 2007, eight senior officials in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality have been arrested for their role in real estate-related scandals. These officials had a big say in the local property sector and business people bent over backward to provide them with privileges.

The scandals in Chongqing reveal a common thread that runs through the corruption in the real estate industry: First, during the land transfer process, developers offer bribes to officials for more favorable policies. Second, bribery is par for the course among developers.

In Chongqing's case, some of 50 top local real estate developers were reportedly involved in the bribery scandals.

This explains why housing prices in most cities are unaffordable to average residents, because the "cost" for obtaining the land use right is unexpectedly high. Apart from expenditures on land, building materials and so on, the cost also includes "bribes."

The ultimate goal for real estate developers is to make money, so the more they spend bribing officials, the more expensive houses will become. Finally it's the buyers who foot the bill.

For an industry mired in corruption and scandals, bubbles are inevitable and the sluggish market is now striking a big blow to big profits made through the corruption in this sector.

Recently, central and local governments launched campaigns to clean up this sector. It's important to eradicate serious corruption and to rid the sector of unnecessary costs. This will help to curb rocketing housing prices and restore consumer confidence than the current tax exemption policy. It is also in the long-term interest of this industry to come clean.

Qilu Evening News

Wrong Sheet

It was recently exposed that a former official in Qianshan County, east China's Anhui Province, remained on the payroll of the local government after he had been jailed on corruption charges for six months. The local government attributed the salary payments to a mistake and said it would recover the money soon.

Similarly, three years ago, there was a report saying that three workers in a designing institute under the State Forestry Administration still received salaries after being arrested for corruption.

The scandals have inspired people to ask: Are national laws being challenged by the administrative power and privileges?

It is common knowledge that privileges are always preserved for officials, who, because of their intricate networking associations, are always able to benefit even after they are scrapped for certain reasons.

How many arrested officials are still receiving salaries?

Is the country's laws really too weak to deal with them?

It's time to tighten the checks over power and, more importantly, ensure the supervisory system work effectively.

Guangzhou Daily

No Vacancy

During a recent interview, a professor of economics at China's prestigious Peking University said that the basic reason for college graduates' difficulty in job hunting is their lack of practical skills. It's said that today's higher education can't match the market's demand.

There is a difference between higher and vocational education. To train qualified workers is the latter's goal. If all colleges focus on training "skilled workers," why do we still have to keep Ivy League schools like Peking University?

College graduates can't be blamed for wanting good jobs. Today, most ordinary jobs offer low salaries and little social security, but college graduates all have to pay high tuition fees to get a higher education diploma, which means decades of hard work for most rural families. So why should college graduates, who pay so much for their education, be satisfied with receiving meager wages?

If the employment difficulty is only limited to a small fraction of students, it's reasonable to blame their personal abilities. But this thorny problem is plaguing most college graduates. Even many outstanding students find it hard to get a job, let alone a highly-paid one. Is it that their personal skills are below standard, or that fate had stepped in and laid them off?

Changjiang Daily

Equal Welfare for All

It is proposed by a member of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the local advisory body, that the government should meet civil servants' housing needs, for the sake of preventing them from abusing their power in home purchases.

If the logic is true that poor housing conditions will increase the risk of corruption among officials, isn't it necessary to subsidize ordinary people's housing purchase? The public may argue that if the ordinary people do not have housing guarantees, some of them might resort to criminal means. Moreover, given the huge number of ordinary people who cannot afford housing improvements, the risk of disrupting social harmony is even bigger.

Many people are living under much heavier pressure than civil servants who have stable income. If the loopholes in the power supervisory system remain, no matter how high civil servants' salaries are and how comfortable their houses are, corruption is not easy to eliminate. The reason is simple: Man's greed is endless.

It's all right to improve the welfare for civil servants, but at the same time, the welfare must also cover the general public as they also deserve to benefit from the country's development achievements.

Yangzi Evening News