There have been debates over the reform and the draining of China's State-owned assets in the past few years. However, property rights and property management at public institutions, including higher education institutions, are often neglected.

The assets at such institutions are usually self-managed properties. These assets are usually very large, and their ownership is unclear when compared with State-owned assets.

The assets at public institutions were probably allocated in the era of the planned economy.

During the past decades, they grew bigger and were used by the public bodies themselves.

The original assets should be owned by the State. But as the assets have grown far beyond the original size, the capital generated overtime should be owned by the public bodies themselves.

In particular, the ownership of independently generated revenue, development funds and the retained profits, as well as assets yielded by reinvestment should belong to public institutions.

For instance, with such money, universities can earn billions of yuan annually through creating teaching sessions for the MBA and EMBA, apart from offering regular courses.

Under the current laws and regulations for universities, their income goes into the universities' account, but expenditure is distributed via other channels.

In recent years, cooperation with foreign academic organizations has been in full swing. The core of joint education lies in independent revenue and expenditure, and such universities can circumvent the supervision of their finance departments.

The State is only able to supervise the standards of expenditure, instead of the specific uses.

How much to spend and where to use it is completely decided by the leaders of these universities and colleges.

It should be made explicit that the ownership of such property should be public. It should belong to all the staff of the institutions. Acknowledging the joint property rights of the staff constitutes a major basis for expanding internal democratic management.

The staff of each of these institutions should elect their own representatives, so as to implement internal oversight of the property.

The representatives selected should assume the role of shareholders or directors in corporations.

The ownership and disposition of these assets are under the control of the leaders at these public agencies, and they must be strictly monitored.

Especially when it comes to the appointment and dismissal of cadres and their term limits, public agencies with real power must adopt stricter policies, putting an end to any possibility for cadres to transform public property into their private assets.

Preventing institutional corruption is extremely important. A critical point is that we must guard against factionalism in appointing cadres.

We should further improve the rotation system, the rule of inquiry and impeachment, as well as the mechanism of public inspection.

This is not only aimed at ensuring the promotion and use of talent, but there is also a huge public economic interest to safeguard.

This is of great political, social and economic significance in the current anti-corruption endeavor in China.

The author is a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn