China’s Communist Party sure has had an embarrassing couple of weeks. Starting with its Green Dam Youth Escort public relations disaster, followed by outrage over the Party’s scapegoat attack on Google, and now, in an extremely telling event, China’s anti-corruption website crashed as users overwhelmed it.

The central government launched its “24-hour anti-corruption website and its accompany hotline number… to inform central government officials about local-level corruption,” the BBC reports.  Unsurprisingly, the number of Chinese citizens logging onto the site far exceeded the site’s capacity.

China corruption website crashes [BBC, 6/24/09]

• A Chinese website set up so people can inform on corrupt officials has been inundated with so many visitors that it crashed shortly after launching.
   
• Staff said the website was designed to cope with a maximum of 1,000 people making a complaint at the same time.
   
• But the number of people using the site far exceeded this when it was launched on Monday.
   
• A Beijing News editorial said the site’s popularity showed that people preferred national to local inquiries.
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• The idea of the 24-hour anti-corruption website (www.12309.gov.cn) and its accompanying hotline number was to inform central government officials about local-level corruption.
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• An earlier version of this nationwide tip-off system generated 20,000 reports of official abuse in 2008.
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• Corruption is a huge problem in China, and correspondents say the central authorities are keen to crack down on it to prevent the issue weakening government control.