Thousands of employees from four provincial governments in China have been removed from office during a national clean-up campaign. The said officials were reportedly paid, but did not work for their salaries.

During the campaign launched last year, over 100,000 officials from Sichuan, Henan, Jilin, and Hebei were found to be "phantom employees". These people had not been rendering work, but are receiving their salaries.

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The Mass Line Campaign, which had been launched to "keep government teams clean and efficient", exposed 28,000 officials from the Sichuan provincial government and 15,000 from Henan who had been found to still receive salaries even though they no longer work in their respective offices.

Some 8,600 officials were also removed from the list of employees in the province of Jilin while over 55,000 unit and staff members--the highest of the four provinces--have been found out to be "phantom employees" in Hebei Province.

"We have taken a series of measures to expose such officials as a major way to make relations between the CPC (Communist Party of China) members and the public closer," Finance Bureau Deputy Head Zhao Wenhai stated during an interview with state-run media Xinhua News Agency on Thursday.

The number of ghost employees being paid by the Chinese government in the four provinces raised alarm among Chinese taxpayers, especially over the Internet where netizens expressed their opinion on the issue.

Chinese Academy of Governance Law Professor Yang Weidong noted that the "easy pay" is one of the major reasons for the influx of "phantom employees", which took a huge portion from the country's budget allocations.

According to a report from the provincial government revealed in August, about 120 million yuan, or US$25 million, have been recovered by the end of July in Hebei alone, accounting to 55 percent of total losses from the phantom employees.

Tagsphantom employees, salary