BEIJING, July 6 (Reuters) – A Chinese court on Monday sentenced Yang Youlin, a former senior local official in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, to death over corruption while also convicting him of abuse of power and money laundering among other charges, a court statement showed.
Yang illegally accepted money and property totalling over 2.2 billion yuan ($324 million) while holding various government posts from 1993 to 2023, the Changzhou Intermediate People’s Court in Jiangsu province said in a statement about its first-instance judgment on Monday.
Reuters could not reach Yang or his attorney for comment.
During a years-long anti-corruption crackdown launched by President Xi Jinping, millions of people within China’s vast bureaucracy have been investigated.
Many of those probes, however, end in disciplinary action, and among those reaching courts death sentences and actual executions over graft remain rare, with just a handful of known cases in over a decade. Suspended death sentences – commonly commuted to life imprisonment – are mostly given to officials found to have accepted large bribes.
‘ESPECIALLY EGREGIOUS’
Yang, the former executive deputy director of Nanjing Development Zone’s administrative committee, “accepted bribes in an especially huge amount, with especially serious circumstances and an especially egregious social impact,” the court said.
“Yang Youlin made a final statement and admitted guilt and expressed remorse in court,” according to the court statement.
In known recent corruption cases, the death sentence has been applied when sums exceeding 1 billion yuan ($147.24 million) were involved. In 2024, Li Jianping, an official in the Inner Mongolia region, was executed after being found guilty in a case involving more than 3 billion yuan.
In another major case, Zhang Zhongsheng, an official from Shanxi province, was found guilty of taking over 1 billion yuan in bribes and sentenced to death in 2018, which on appeal was changed in 2021 to a suspended death sentence and life imprisonment.
($1 = 6.7916 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Beijing NewsroomEditing by Tomasz Janowski)
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