By Xinhua
Beijing : The website of China’s National Bureau of Corruption Prevention (NCBP) crashed just hours after it was launched, as a huge number of people logged on to the site to lodge their complaints against corrupt officials.
The website “yfj.mos.gov.cn” launched Tuesday was inaccessible by afternoon due to the large number of visitors, Beijing Youth Daily reported.
An NBCP official, who declined to be named, confirmed the breakdown of the website saying, “Repairs were carried out soon after the website’s sudden breakdown and normal service has been resumed.
“The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations.”
By 4 p.m. Wednesday, netizens had left 22 pages of messages on the website’s guest book. Many were anxious to report specific cases of official corruption but were immediately directed by the webmaster to other websites, such as that of the ministry of supervision.
Some called for the strengthening of the government’s anti-corruption work, others said corruption in institutes of higher education and grassroots governments should receive special attention.
“The corruption problem in China is a fatal illness, establishing more institutions cannot solve the problem,” one comment read.
The enthusiasm that greeted the launch of the website reflects on the growing frustration felt by the people towards corruption at government level, which has been accentuated by several high-profile corruption cases in the last five years.
Many senior officials have recently been found guilty of serious corruption, including the former director of the National Bureau of Statistics Qiu Xiaohua, the former food and drug administration head Zheng Xiaoyu and former Party head of Shanghai Chen Liangyu.
The NBCP was officially established Sep 13 with Ma Wen, Minister of Supervision, as its head.
The bureau has been entrusted to collect and analyse information from the banking, land use, medicine and telecommunications sectors, among others, and to share it with prosecuting organs, courts and the police.
It is not, however, involved in the investigation of individual cases.