Chinese regions rectify work on gang crime crackdown

BEIJING - China's leading group for the national crackdown on gang crime said Thursday that problems found out by central authorities during their first round of inspection of a national crackdown on gangs and organized crime last year had been rectified.

From July to September 2018, ten central inspection teams were deployed to ten provincial-level regions to inspect work on combating gang crime, proposing 992 pieces of advice to Party committees and governments of the ten regions.

The ten regions were the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Liaoning, Fujian, Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Guangdong and Sichuan and the municipality of Chongqing.

The governments of the ten regions issued reports on the rectification work before the end of December 2018, indicating that the problems had been basically solved.

During the rectification period, police in the ten regions busted 1,229 mafia-style groups, and sealed up, froze and seized 4.94 billion yuan ($737 million) of assets related to the cases.

A total of 3,021 people in 2,896 cases involving mafias, corruption and "protective umbrellas" have been investigated or punished.

The office will re-inspect the rectification work in the first half of this year to ensure the problems do not reoccur.