China's State Council has decided to send six teams of officials to 12 provinces to assess their performance in halting illicit investment projects.

Officials from the National Reform and Development Commission (NRDC), the Ministry of Land and Resources and other central authorities will be dispatched to Shandong, Jiangsu, Hebei, Henan, Anhui, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Zhejiang, Jilin, Jiangxi and Hunan, NRDC officials told Xinhua Monday.

The provinces will have to report what they have done to cool off runaway investment, whether they have strictly observed land, environmental protection and other policies when approving projects, and what punishments they have meted out to those responsible for illicit investments," the officials said.

According to the latest figures from the NRDC, China recorded 29.1 percent growth in urban fixed asset investment in the first eight months of the year. A total of 131,000 new projects were launched nationwide, involving investments of 4.5 trillion yuan (US$570 billion).

An April survey by the NRDC of 3,779 projects, each involving investment of more than 100 million yuan, found that 44.2 percent of them did not have approvals for land use and 43.9 percent of them had not secured environmental impact assessment and approvals.

To make it worse, NDRC officials said a large number of the illicit projects involve the charcoal, coal mining, cement, steel and textile industries, where the government has been endeavoring to cut oversupply.

Convinced that runaway investment is driving the economy to the verge of overheating, the Chinese government has recently taken an unprecedented tough stance with regard to defiant local officials.

In August, the cabinet publicly criticized Yang Jing, leader of the Inner Mongolia government and his two deputies, for ignoring macro control policies and failing to stop an illicit thermal power plant involving 2.9 billion yuan of investment.

A month later, a senior leader of Henan Province in central China, was sanctioned for failing to stop the construction of an unapproved university campus occupying nearly 1,000 hectares of land in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital.

The six teams are expected to report their findings by the end of the month.

(Xinhua News Agency October 17, 2006)