China has banned almost 4,000 Party and government officials from joining more than 550 overseas trips on public expenses in the six months to the end of November, according to a top discipline official.
Ma Wen, deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China, or CCDI said 830,000 official passport-holders went abroad in that period, down 18.9 percent year on year.
Ma said the CCDI will work with the Foreign Ministry and other departments to strengthen supervision over government-paid trips abroad.
She said tough penalties will be meted out to those who fabricate invitation letter to get approval by higher authorities.
She said that those who prolong the length of stay abroad or increase the number of places visited without authorization will also be punished.
In December, China's State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs disqualified an American university from arranging government-paid training courses.
The Northwestern Polytechnic University, based in Fremont, California, was found to be offering what an official called an "unfaithful schedule" for officials from Wenzhou City of east China's Zhejiang Province.
At the end of November two officials in east China's Jiangxi Province were sacked and another one was given a disciplinary warning for attending a visit to the U.S. and Canada at public expense, because the trip was disguised as a study tour.