BEIJING — China’s anti-graft campaign is now targeting officials who have sent their spouses and children abroad, where they can create channels to potentially funnel illicit gains and establish footholds for eventual escape from the mainland.

Nearly 900, mostly mid-level, government officials in the southern province of Guangdong have been demoted or forced to resign or retire early after being identified as having spouses or offspring with permanent residency or citizenship abroad while they continued to work on the mainland. As they remain without their families, they are known colloquially as “naked officials’’ — a term popular with the public because of its mocking tone.

It is the first time a provincial government has taken action against them. The move signals a new approach in President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign that takes aim at a phenomenon in Chinese politics that has hindered the Communist Party’s efforts to curb the flight of crooked officials and their ill-gotten assets.

“The perception among the Chinese public is that these officials use their positions for their personal gains, then they send their families away and when the time comes, they are going to bail,’’ said Mr Dali Yang, a China expert at the University of Chicago.

Guangdong authorities said they found more than 1,000 such officials, among whom about a fifth had promised to try to get their families to return to China. Though it is up for debate, the general definition of “naked officials” excludes those whose children are only studying abroad but not holding foreign residency or passports — allowing the sons and daughters of top leaders to pursue expensive college degrees at top overseas universities.

Political analysts and state media reports said with its proximity to semi-autonomous Hong Kong and its links to overseas Chinese communities around the world, Guangdong was the natural place for such efforts to be launched.

But the problem is by no means unique to the province. In 2012, Mr Wang Guoqiang, former party boss of the small north-eastern Chinese city of Fengcheng, fled China to join his daughter in the United States. He brought his wife and a rumoured 200 million yuan (S$40 million) in illicit funds with him, state media reports said.

Months later, authorities in Liaoning province said they had launched an investigation into Mr Wang for accepting bribes and violating party regulations on travelling overseas without permission. The party’s discipline organ fired him from the party and his government posts. But he had already fled the country.

Chinese authorities last year arrested 762 people suspected of work-related crimes who had been on the run and retrieved illegal gains worth 10 billion yuan, said the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the office of the country’s top prosecutor, although it was unclear how many of the defendants were overseas.

Analysts said the flight of such officials reflects a wider anxiety among the elite about the future of China under Communist rule. “These members of the elite do not have faith in the long-term future of the Communist Party so, along with money, they also take with them state secrets or intellectual property rights regarding high technology and so forth,’’ said Mr Willy Lam, an expert on Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“I think this is what they’re most worried about. This exodus of members of the elite could compromise state security.” AP