Chinese authorities on Wednesday released a "most-wanted" list of 100 top economic fugitives on the run abroad, the latest endeavor to track down and repatriate corrupt officials. The list includes names, photos, job titles and the ID card/passport numbers of the suspects, who are accused of taking bribes, embezzling and laundering money, along with the destinations to which they likely fled. The intensified international manhunt for economic fugitives is a part of the far-reaching anti-corruption campaign currently underway in China. It has been hailed by the public and has raised higher expectations on bringing corrupt runaway officials to justice and recovering their ill-gotten assets.

In top spot on the most wanted list is Yang Xiuzhu, former vice mayor of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, who was in charge of urban planning. She reportedly fled to the US with an alleged 253 million yuan ($41 million). The Chinese public wants fugitives repatriated and the stolen assets recovered. They won't allow corrupt officials to enjoy their embezzled assets with impunity overseas. However, there is still a long way to go.

Reports that more escaped corrupt officials have been snared are encouraging, but it is rarely revealed whether the assets they stashed abroad are retrieved.

Huang Feng, director of the Institute for International Criminal Law at Beijing Normal University said in a media interview recently that the reclaimed assets that were stolen by runaway corrupt officials are just the tip of the iceberg.

The reasons are complicated. For one thing, Chinese authorities in the past years paid more attention to fugitive repatriation than asset recovery. For another, the process of asset recovery is complex, time consuming and often frustrating, as stolen assets are concealed under foreign jurisdictions. It's a conundrum facing all countries plagued by corruption.

Nonetheless, we have every reason to be confident in the ongoing Operation Fox Hunt, under which hundreds of economic fugitives who were living abroad were captured and  where asset retrieval was put in an equally important position as fugitive repatriation.

Support and understanding in the ongoing global manhunt for runaway corrupt officials are needed. Compared with domestic anti-corruption efforts, repatriating fugitives and recovering stolen assets inherently pose more difficulties and asset recovery is particularly a protracted process. Bringing escaped corrupt officials to justice and reclaiming their overseas assets will constitute a formidable deterrent to other corrupt officials, through which the assets recovered will further satisfy public demands for the anti-graft campaign.