China's foreign ministry recently added information about the families of twelve ministers to its website, which experts say is an effort to emphasize the central government's focus on cracking down on corruption through familial networks.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs added the biographical and family details of Xie Hangsheng, who was appointed as chief inspector of the Inspector's Office of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September.
"Mr. Xie is married with a son," read Xie's biography.
The ministry has been making ministers' family information public since 2013 when current Foreign Minister Wang Yi took office. It is now the only one of the 25 departments under the Sate Council that has posted its ministers' family status online, the Chinese Business View newspaper reported on Sunday.
The family status of another eleven ministers, including Wang and Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong, are all also available on the website.
Wang Yi is married and has a daughter, according to the website.
The move comes after the central government's decision to strengthen its supervision of officials' families in 2010, Ren Jin, a law professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance, told the Legal Daily.
Zhu Lijia, a professor of public management at the Chinese Academy of Governance, told people.com that making information public, especially the disclosure of officials' family information, is a fundamental way to uproot so-called "naked officials."
Naked officials are to officials whose spouses and children have emigrated overseas, which relates to corruption as it's a common practice for corrupt officials to flee justice by first arranging for their families to settle down abroad and transferring them their ill-gotten assets, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
South China's Guangdong Province launched a series of investigations in February 2014 and ferreted out more than 1,000 naked officials, Xinhua reported.
