Drunk drivers to face job scrutiny

By Li Xinran and Jane Chen  |   2009-8-13  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

CHINA will send police records of alcohol-related driving that led to serious road accidents to offending drivers' employers to use as a reference in career evaluations.

It is the latest initiative following a spate of recent lethal road accidents involving drunk driving, People Daily's reported yesterday.

Those who with such police records would be off limits for awards, the report said, citing an unidentified official from the traffic administration section of the Ministry of Public Security.

A company whose employee has such a violation record will also be ruled out in citywide awards evaluation, it said.

Authorities will also forward records of violations that have led to serious road accidents to banks and insurance companies.

Among the measures, a two-month crackdown on drunk driving will be implemented nationwide, the official disclosed.

Crackdowns have been adopted as a major method in fighting drunk driving because traffic police are understaffed to make 24-hour checks, the official explained.

In 2008, there were 250,000 traffic police officers nationwide overseeing the country's 3.73 million kilometers of roads.

The ministry organized three crackdowns on drunk driving in the first half of this year, on February 20, March 5 and March 20.

In the February crackdown, more than 100,000-plus officers were deployed and more than 3,000 drivers detained for drunk driving, the official told the newspaper.

Statistics indicated in the first six months, the country's police cracked 222,000 drunk driving cases, 8.7 percent up from the same period last year.

Last month, drunk driver Sun Weiming, 30, was sentenced to death - subject to appeal - for having killed four people in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, at the end of last year.

Two other arrests have been made, one in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, in late June, and the other in Chengdu in May, on similar charges.

Zhang Mingbao from Nanjing allegedly killed five people including a pregnant woman in a wild driving spree on June 30.

His blood alcohol level was nearly four times over the legal limit, police said.