HEFEI, April 13 (Xinhuanet) -- Economic crimes committed by village heads, the lowest-ranking officials in China, has increased in recent years imposing new challenges to the nation's anti-corruption endeavors, said a law expert.

    Wang Jianxin, an expert with the Law School of the Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics in east China's Jiangxi Province, recently finished a survey of village officials' abuse of power and related economic crimes in the country.

    Wang said amid China's fight against corruption by high-ranking officials, corrupt grassroots officials have cropped up in quantity. Such cases involved bribes valued at thousands, tens and even hundreds of thousands yuan (from 240.96 to 1.2 million US dollars).

    Economically developed Zhejiang Province of eastern China reported 55 cases of embezzlement by village cadres in 2003. In Haidong Prefecture of northwestern Qinghai Province, seven cases involving 11 village heads were investigated and prosecuted between 2002 and 2003. Five years earlier, however, there were no such crimes at the village-level in the region, according to Wang's survey.

    Song Yexian, former party head of Longgang Village in eastern China's Anhui Province, was recently sentenced to three years' imprisonment for illegally dividing up 31,000 yuan (3,735 US dollars) in public funds with other village committee members. Song's crime also included a bribery valued at 10,000 yuan (1,205 US dollars).

    Song was an orphan brought up by the villagers. He was named "No. 1 village head" in Anhui Province for his outstanding achievements. He had led the whole village to set up a village-owned company, and made his village, for six consecutive years, rank first in terms of overall strength among all villages in the province. But eventually, he failed to resist temptation of bribes.

    Prior to this, Jin Mingchi, committee head of Dali Village in Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province, embezzled 2 million yuan (240,964 US dollars) in public funds. A worse corrupt case was reported in southwest China's Guizhou Province, involving10 million yuan (1.2 million US dollars) in state-owned capital. The money was appropriated by a village committee as a whole.

    Wang Jianxin said corrupt village officials accumulated wealth by various illegal means. Included were making a fraudulent claims, illegally possessing compensation for land use and funds for construction projects and selling off public properties.

    Though their ranks were low, the money they embezzled was as much as their high-ranking peers. The punishments these corrupt lower official receive were not light, said Wang. Imprisonment sentenced for the corrupt grass-root officials ranged from several years to decades, Wang added.

    The fast increase of village-level corruption was ascribed by Wang Kaiyu, a noted researcher with Anhui Academy of Social Sciences, to the patriarchal behaviors of the grassroots officials and their almost unlimited power against poor awareness of law. Wang Kaiyu said absence of a supervision system for village committees also accounted for the crime increase.

    At present, no special organs has been set up to supervise the daily work of village committee, nor an audit system, said Wang. Even worse, no irregular effort has been made to audit village work.

    Several factors could explain the increases in corruption at the village level.

    On one hand, the Central Government's continuous support to agriculture and farmers has brought about great changes in villages nationwide. On the other hand, the governmental support made more funds available for appropriation of farm land and for infrastructure construction.

    Wang Kaiyu said that village officials' corruption would not only affect the village-level democracy system and but also erode the relationship between cadres and the masses. In some richer villages, more and more farmers, driven by personal interests, resorted to bribery to win elections. This was severely devastating the villagers' self-governing system. As village officials are very close to the people, their corruption can directly trigger conflict and hence exert pressures on social stability in China, Wang Kaiyu argued.

    Wang Jianxin called for rules to enforced and supervision systems to be established to stop up regulatory loopholes for corruption in villages. He suggested that money and books should be managed by different people and that all expenses should be scrutinized.

    To connect village officials' income with the villages' revenue will also be an effective way to prevent corruption, some other experts suggested. They believed the State should also hammer out a law on preventing crimes taking advantage of posts. Enditem