China's top procurator Cao Jianming said Sunday that prosecutors nationwide investigated 2,524 corrupt officials at or above the county head level, with 198 at the prefectural level and seven at the ministerial level.
The prosecutors took a hard line on civil servants who abuse their power for personal gains or take bribes, investigating 7,366 people in administrative and law-enforcement departments and 2,395 in the judiciary system, said Cao, while delivering a work report at the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC).
Reviewing the work of the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) in 2011, Cao, procurator-general of the SPP, said greater emphasis was put to the combination of punitive and preventive measures, with procuratorates at all levels launching extensive publicity campaigns to prevent work-related crimes.
For 2012, Cao said measures such as preventive consultation, preventive investigation and warning education would be deepened to boost the building of punishment and prevention system for corruption.
According to Wang Yukai, a professor with the National Academy of Administration, the lack of prevention is often the reason for officials, especially the chief official of a department, to make the initial wrong step and then begin to take more bribes or embezzle more state assets until they are busted.
In a separate report to the parliamentary session Sunday, China's chief justice Wang Shengjun said courts nationwide convicted 29,000 people for embezzlement, bribery and malfeasance last year.
Cao said efforts were intensified last year to crack down on crimes of offering bribes, prosecuting 4,217 bribers, a year-on-year increase of 6.2 percent.
"Combining prevention and punishment will be more effective in combating corruption. But it will also require greater efforts to improve the anti-corruption system and further engage the public and the media in overseeing power," said Wang, the professor.
A communique issued after a plenary meeting of the discipline watchdog of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in January said, "The task of anti-corruption remains arduous. The war on corruption has scored evident achievements, but prominent problems still exist, and although anti-corruption efforts have been intensified, corruption still occurs."
It said greater efforts would be made to build a system of corruption prevention and control and more emphasis would be put to the combination of prevention and punishment in 2012, which the communique called "a year of significance" for deepening the anti-corruption drive.
Zheng Hong, an NPC deputy and procurator-general of the People' s Procuratorate of Guangdong Province, said, "A concept should be established to view both punishment and prevention as achievements. Investigating and preventing work-related crimes are equally important."
Zheng said the prevention of such crimes should be done in a comprehensive manner, employing measures of education, preventive investigation and crime-file inquiring to advance prevention in both individuals and industries.
Meanwhile, Zheng said preventive work should be intensified in grassroots organizations and corruption-prone areas just as in big construction projects.
Chen Shu, an NPC deputy and lawyer from the southern city of Guangzhou, said the more emphasis on prevention shows China is improving its anti-corruption system to reduce work-related crimes at the root. This would mean less damage to the society, Chen added.
As the current national anti-corruption five-year plan will end by this year, Chen proposed harsher punishment for bribers in drawing the next plan.
"This is to create a social environment that will eventually lead to the ban on the corrupt 'hidden rules', and to confine market entities to operate according to the law. It's also a preventive measure in another perspective," Chen said.