While sky-high house prices are making home ownership a distant dream for many ordinary Chinese, some officials are taking advantage of the government's housing plans to seize dozens of apartments.
The latest scandal involves a former village head accused of the misallocation of 136 resettlement houses which were intended to be compensation for local farmers whose houses had been demolished by the government to make way for construction .
Investigation by the disciplinary authority of Hefei city confirmed a week ago that Fang Guangyun, the former Communist Party chief of Zhanbei Community in the city's Xinzhan district, had illegally taken 11 resettlement houses for his family.
Wang Kecui was among the 300 people who should be relocated in Fang's village. She said more than 500 people had been considered for placement in the resettlement houses and she was curious as to where the other 200 came from.
Some villagers claimed that the distribution of 136 of the total 380 housing units involved government malpractice.
Before the demolition, more than 180 migrants suddenly moved to the village and many of them later got resettlement houses, according to the critics.
Villager He Pei said, "It is ridiculous that some houses were even given out under the names of three elderly people in the village who had been dead for years."
He said his own houses were not been demolished yet, but his name was used by someone else to acquire resettlement properties. He was worried that he would have no chance to get any apartment after his houses are demolished in the future.
Hefei's disciplinary authority concluded that Fang had colluded with the local demolition department, policemen and accountants to form a fraud network to forge registrations, financial accounts and manipulate other procedures needed to acquire the resettlement houses.
Fang was also accused of being involved in selling farmers' land in violation of rules and regulations.
According to villagers, their land was requisitioned for less than 10,000 yuan ($1,607) per mu (0.067 hectares), while the government later sold it to developers for 30,000 to 50,000 yuan per mu.
Actually, Fang's abuse of power had already been exposed in 2004, and the district government decided to remove him from the post in 2005. However, that decision was not meted out.
Currently, a further investigation into the case is being carried out in Hefei.
The case is similar to that of Zhai Zhenfeng, a former directo r of the housing administrative bureau in a district of Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province.
Zhai was arrested on Monday after he and his family were found to own 31 houses and his wife to have taken advantage of Zhai's position to sell affordable houses for personal gain.
China's affordable housing project was subsidized by the government and designed for low-income groups.
However, it seems that those groups are not benefiting as they should, with Zhai's case apparently just the tip of an iceberg. Statistics from the housing management department of Zhengzhou show that from 2005 to 2009, only one third of the affordable houses were offered to citizens in need and the rest were suspected to be taken by people by illegal means.
Industry insiders say some government departments or officials will keep the affordable houses for themselves during the approval process, and developers also often retain a certain amount of houses for their own interests.
While there exist a number of supervision measures in place from the approval process to construction and distribution of affordable and resettlement houses, manipulation of power has sometimes obstructed their implementation.
To prevent corruption in this field, experts say, officials should strengthen self-discipline and at the same time government information should be more transparent to bolster public monito ring.
