THERE has been extensive media coverage of late about China's top leadership's personal lives and experiences.

In a surprising move, starting last week Xinhua news agency has been doing a series of biographical reports that shine a light on the career paths and family lives of senior Party members, from newly elected Party chief Xi Jinping on down.

Previously shrouded in secrecy, these figures' private personas are now undergoing a process of demystification. They are portrayed as being no different from man in the street and are, in Xinhua's words, "men of the people."

Traditionally leaders are poker-faced, dark-suited dignitaries who are often and only seen on TV and are not easily approachable.

This gesture of greater transparency is applauded by the general public, and offers further proof of what the new leadership has made its urgent priority - repairing the Party's links to the people.

These ties have been frayed over opaqueness, public mistrust, official corruption and lack of accountability.

Disclosure of assets

In line with the top brass's avowed commitment to redeem the government's image, the country's supreme anti-graft body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), recently began drafting a long-awaited regulation on official disclosure of income and assets, the Procuratorate Daily reported last Monday.

Though it's not the first of such rules, the draft, if passed, will represent a departure from existing disciplinary policies, in that its authors are strongly proposing mandatory disclosure of official assets. Many of them are deputies to the National People's Congress, China's legislature.

In the past, officials in provinces where so-called "sunshine" policies were tried out had already been required to report their assets to the watchdog, but the results were never released to the public for scrutiny. The lack of social oversight removes any credibility from these rules.

Today some deputies are debating whether publicizing bureaucrats' declared assets would constitute a breach of their privacy and jeopardize their legitimately acquired wealth, according to the Procuratorate Daily.

Discussion of these technical niceties suggests the benevolent nature of our lawmakers, which is good, but at present, that should be the least of their concerns in the war on graft.

The battle against sleaze has entered a critical phase in which laws and penalties, should they be applied at all, have been proved too lenient to deter offenders.

Yet many of our bleeding-heart politicians are still arguing for mercy.

Mercy will be the anti-graft crusade's biggest undoing, for that's exactly what corrupt cadres are counting on and have long enjoyed - impunity.

In fact, proposals for disclosing civil servants' assets have been floated for a long time, but they never materialized.

The reason is that they were fiercely resisted and ultimately boycotted by officials on grounds they constitute "blatant intrusions upon privacy."

But to enjoy the comfort and privileges that come with public office, they have to accept a trade-off involving disclosure. One cannot think of a cogent reason why their privacy should be respected more than that of their Western counterparts, whose pay, assets, investments and family wealth are closely monitored by the state and media.

Many Chinese officials object to any probe into their income because they stand to lose everything if they don't conceal ill-gotten gains - everything including jobs, Party membership, freedom and, in rare cases, lives.

The past decade has seen fewer and fewer death sentences given to egregiously corrupt officials.

No mortal threat

China's Penal Code stipulates that civil servants found guilty of accepting bribes worth more than 100,000 yuan (US$14,706) be sentenced to death.

This amount of "killer" bribes that would doom the receiver to death now seems to have become obsolete, or lifted to the astronomical range of billions.

Xu Zongheng, ex-mayor of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, was condemned to life imprisonment in 2011, despite the fact he took bribes to the tunes of 1 billion yuan.

About a decade ago, when the laws still had some teeth, Hu Changqing, ex-vice governor of Jiangxi Province, was executed in 2000 after being convicted of corruption. He took around 7 million yuan in bribes.

There's an ancient Chinese saying that punishment isn't intended for the nobility. Today China's venal officials can rest assured in the knowledge that they face no mortal threat for cheating and stealing.

This newspaper does not rejoice in the taking of human lives, but let's admit it, capital punishment may be the sole effective deterrent against runaway corruption.

Although the reduced number of executions every year has been hailed by some as a success of humanitarianism, and has spared China some chronic criticism from international human rights groups, there are ample reasons for thinking that scrapping capital punishment in corruption cases is a bad idea.

Some pundits assert that there is no incentive for corrupt cadres to flee overseas if they are exempt from death row.

Moreover, they argue that death penalty terminates investigation, and this can only please accomplices fearful of being turned against.

The logic is untenable, according to an op-ed written by law professor Wang Lin last year. Corrupt cadres already in exile abroad have no reason to turn themselves in for extradition and stand trial back home, even though they are promised a pardon of their wretched lives.

And without the death penalty, corrupt officials still can dodge investigators, or be "silenced" by their collaborators.

Scholars in favor of waiving capital punishment contend that the crux of China's corruption problem is a flawed system, so it doesn't matter how many people are killed if the system remains the same.

But until major strides are made in effectively preventing or busting corruption, rendering the death penalty symbolic, it's premature to abolish it now, said Wang, the legal expert.

The death sentence is an evil, but a necessary evil. Strangely, however, some of China's supposedly greatest minds fail to see the plain truth and plead for clemency on behalf of those deserving the harshest penalty.

Zhang Weiying, a renowned liberal economist at Peking University, said recently that China's anti-graft campaign is in a bind.

Tough crackdowns will meet with either passive cooperation or active revolt by officials, he warned.

Amnesty for old sinners?

He went on to suggest that amnesty be granted to those who ended corruption after the recently concluded 18th Party Congress.

One doesn't need to read Adam Smith to see the fallacy of his reasoning. First, how morally consistent is it to let corrupt individuals get away with the loot?

Second, how can you tell if they have mended their ways if everything about their financial status is kept under wraps?

Aware of the damage online whistle blowers can do, many cunning officials are concealing their luxury Constantin wristwatches and Hermes belts, telltale clues of graft leading occasionally to their downfall.

A civil servant friend told me recently that all his superiors, upon arriving at work every day, take off their Panerais, Omegas and Zeniths in exchange for cheap Casios. By doing so they don't have to carefully cover their wrists all the time.

Apparently the stakes are getting higher in the fight against corruption.

With the alarming frequency at which officials are brought down by giveaways like their attire, hinting at endemic corruption, how can an intelligent person, more intelligent than most, still make the terribly misinformed case for pardoning old sinners, naively hopeful that they would reform on their own?