In response to a motion of tailing after government officials, state-owned business leaders or their kin to deal with possible corruption, which has been implemented in pilot places since early 2004, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) vowed at a recent meeting to keep running the work.

The Central Committee of Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League, which proposed of the motion, said that the number of government officials and state owned enterprises' (SOEs) leaders fleeing abroad with huge sums of money has risen in recent years, so keeping records of these people's major moves has become compulsory to detect corruption.

The CCDI has been recording officials' travel plans and their children's job applications since July, 2004. Xiangfang, in central China's Hubei Province, Shuozhou, in north China's Shanxi Province and other two big enterprises in Beijing, are pilot locations for the program.

"China will accumulate experience from the pilot spots and come up with the next steps," an official with CCDI who declined to be named was quoted as saying in China Youth Daily last week.

The records should contain items such as the person involved and his relative's destinations for studying or living abroad, their expense resources and authentic certificates, the proposal says.

Chinese anti-corruption experts have worked put a "modus operandi" for fugitive officials.

They first search for an ideal fugitive destination under the name of overseas work, then send relatives to the targeted country and finally transfer an immense sum of money to overseas banks before fleeing themselves.

"The number of corrupt Chinese corrupt officials who run overseas has increased since 2000, the year Hu Changqing, former vice-governor of east China's Jiangxi Province, was sentenced to death for corruption," said Wang Minggao, a professor at Hunan University and leader of a state-funded anti-corruption strategy research program. "The case was a great deterrent force to corrupt officials."

Though the Chinese government has not disclosed the number of corrupt Chinese officials who had fled overseas, Jia Chunwang, Procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, however,said China brought back 596 fugitive corrupt officials from overseas in 2003.