Anti-gang work ramps up, commission says

A total of 856 mafia-style organizations and 2,458 other gangs have been busted during the past year, and authorities have seized 256.2 billion yuan ($37.6 billion) in assets related to such crimes and solved 138,000 cases involving organized crime, official data shows.

The trend of cracking down on organized crime has been consolidated, and the public security situation has continued to improve. The number of criminal cases nationwide dropped 6.2 percent from January to August this year, according to the national leading group against organized crime under the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

In addition, a total of 25,539 cases involving corruption and providing shelter for such crimes were probed, 23,366 people received disciplinary sanctions or administrative punishment, and 2,395 other people were transferred to judicial organs.

At a meeting on promoting the national campaign against organized crime held on Friday, Guo Shengkun, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, emphasized the importance of clearing accumulated cases as the three-year-long campaign is coming to an end, and asked public security organs to speed up their investigations.

Guo, also head of the commission, said disciplinary inspection and supervision organs and political and legal organs should strengthen coordination to ensure the "protective umbrellas" behind gangs are dug out through by reviewing and cross-checking cases.

Inspections and supervision of organized crimes at the village level is a significant part of the campaign. A total of 236 mafia-style organizations and 705 criminal gangs were smashed over the past year. More than 400 cases of election bribery and other abnormal means that interfered with the election of village Party committees have been probed, and over 600 cadres have been penalized.

According to a nationwide opinion poll conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics in the first half of this year, 95.1 percent of the public expressed "satisfaction" or "relative satisfaction" with the results of the special campaign, an increase of 15.1 percentage points over the same period in 2018.