Imagine you are a Chinese local-government official at an opulent banquet that is decidedly beyond the “
” threshold for austerity. You watch as your boss – who pulled up outside the banquet hall in a gleaming Mercedes-Benz S class sedan — tucks into a steaming bowl of shark’s fin soup, washing it down with a mouthful of Romanée Conti. Potential eyewitnesses are hard to come by. What to do?
The Communist Party’s anticorruption agency has just such a scenario in mind. The Central Committee for Discipline Inspection this week updated its smartphone app to allow users to report instances of official corruption on the spot and upload cellphone photos to back it up. Best of all for the nervous cadre, it can be done anonymously.
The app – helpfully called the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection Website App – leads the user to the commission’s anticorruption website. There it calls for officials to oppose
– meaning formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and waste. The site’s current emphasis is on the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival holiday, as it notes the Four Winds blow most fiercely on those special days.
The app is available on Apple’s App Store and on various Android stores, as well as
.
Once installed and in action, the app lists different categories of corruption. They include use of public funds for banquets, domestic tourism, travelling abroad, holding luxurious weddings and funerals and other misdeeds.
A screenshot of the new anticorruption app.
Once selected, the app takes the user to another page where he or she can describe the misdeeds, mark the date and upload photos or videos, for a maximum of two files at five megabytes each.
Users can describe the alleged misdeeds and upload photos, videos and other materials.
The app’s release comes a week after
. CCDI hopes its new app will show its continued determination in cracking down on corruption, it said in a press release.
The app was a popular topic of conversation this week on the Weibo social-media service. “Everybody can supervise. That’s good,” said one user. “The masses have sharp eyes,” said another.
Some were less optimistic.
“This is useless!” wrote one critic. “Officials in my hometown all go to the neighboring town to go dining, wining and whoring since no one will recognize them!”
