China's top graft-buster says fight will never end

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's fight against deeply engrained corruption will never end, the country's top official in charge of tackling graft said ahead of a key meeting to root out corruption in the world's second-largest economy. Since President Xi Jinping launched his high-profile campaign against corruption upon assuming office last year a series of senior official have been felled, including powerful former domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang. "All these efforts have gained the support of the general public," said Wang Qishan, who heads the ruling Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection "This is just the beginning," he said, adding that the party's anti-graft campaign requires "consistency, intensified supervision, discipline and accountability". Efforts to build a clean government "will never be concluded", Wang was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency late on Friday. Wang made the comments while talking with overseas members of the advisory board of the School of Economics and Management at Beijing's elite Tsinghua University, Xinhua said. "A clean government and a healthy and fair market offers the best soft environment for investment," it paraphrased Wang as saying. The party's graft watchdog begins its annual plenum on Saturday. It is not clear how long it will go on for. The party's own plenum ended this week with vague promises to boost the rule of law, but made no mention of the disgraced Zhou. The party announced in July that it had launched a corruption investigation into Zhou, following months of speculation about his fate, becoming the highest-profile victim yet of Xi's sweeping war on graft. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Michael Perry)