A court in eastern China has sentenced a former official to death for taking bribes worth around 2.2 billion yuan, about $325 million, in a case that ranks among the country's largest by value in recent memory. State media said the man, Yang Youlin, was convicted of corruption offenses accumulated over some 30 years.
The case
Yang had held senior posts in the Nanjing area, including at an economic and technological development zone, and prosecutors said he used his positions to help businesses win contracts, land and approvals in return for payments between the early 1990s and 2023, the South China Morning Post reported. The Changzhou Intermediate People's Court in Jiangsu province convicted him of charges including bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, Xinhua reported.
The sentence
Along with the death sentence, the court ordered the confiscation of Yang's assets and the recovery of the bribes, Al Jazeera reported. China does hand down death sentences in the gravest corruption cases, though in many high-value cases the penalty is a "suspended" death sentence that is typically commuted to life imprisonment; how Yang's sentence will ultimately be carried out was not spelled out in the state-media accounts.
The wider campaign
The conviction is the latest in the anti-corruption drive that has run throughout Xi Jinping's time in power and has ensnared thousands of officials, from local functionaries to senior figures. The authorities present it as a effort to clean up the party and government and to reassure the public; some outside observers argue it has also been used to sideline political rivals. Either way, cases like Yang's, involving huge sums built up over decades in the parts of the state that control land and construction, are held up by Beijing as proof that no official is beyond reach, and as a warning to others.
