Shortcuts to fighting corruption(2)

News portals reached by the Global Times, including xinhuanet.com, china.com.cn and sina.com.cn, said they don't track how many Web users have clicked on the link. Staff members from both xinhuanet.com and china.com.cn told the Global Times that they "just received orders from the top" to place the hyperlink on their front page.

"All we need to do is to promote the link," a staff member from xinhuanet.com said.

Government agencies contacted by the Global Times could not provide statistics on how much traffic was directed from the news websites to their reporting pages as of press time.

Lackluster reception

Tian Ye, an engineer with an architecture company in Ordos, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, told the Global Times that he was excited about the new method to combat graft. "The link is definitely a handy tool that will motivate me to report corruption," Tian said. "Before this, I didn't know I could access the agencies' reporting websites so easily."

Wang Wenzhang, a professor at the Institute of Social Development at Peking University, told the Global Times that the link encourages people to report corruption at the grass-roots level. "The people's supervision is the most effective and an essential way to spot and combat corruption," Wang said. "The link on major websites facilitates this process and is thus a meaningful add-on."