The Chinese judiciary and legal experts have joined forces to crack down on official corruption and eliminate the "corruption culture".

A seminar on prevention of corruption-related crimes was held by the Supreme People's Procuratorate Wednesday.

Ma Haibin, deputy director of the Anti-bribery Bureau under the procuratorate, said such crimes were well entrenched, and serious indication of wide scale corruption.

He said corruption generally showed four characteristics, including broader crime fields, more group crime, more diversified and intellectualized means, and a trend towards more international crime.

The crime fields had expanded from party and government offices, the judiciary, financial departments and Customs to all levels of society, said Ma.

Bribery had also appeared in the education system, and even the funeral industry, which had previously been free from corruption.

The suspects always made numerous contacts at all levels of society, conspiring together, so that one case may be associated with many others in a web of crime linking dozens, or even hundreds of people.

Mentioning the diversified and intellectualized means used by suspects, Ma said money laundering was a common way to deal with illegal earnings.

The suspects also illegally exercise their functions and powers to accept the profitable opportunities in business, going abroad for travel or using cars and real estate as bribes.

With China's entry into the World Trade Organization, the suspects used their international connections to conspire with foreign accomplices, said Ma.

They transferred their illegal earnings and their families' fortunes abroad after committing crimes, he said.

Statistics show that some 207,103 cases related to official bribery and malpractice, including 5,541 major cases, have been registered by procuratorates at different levels since 1998.

And 12,830 middle and high-level cadres were prosecuted during the period.

(Xinhua News Agency August 14, 2003)