China hands life sentence to former justice minister over bribery

BEIJING, Feb 2 (Reuters) – China’s former justice minister Tang Yijun was sentenced by a Chinese court to life in prison on Monday for taking bribes, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The Xiamen Intermediate People’s Court in the southeastern coastal Fujian province said Tang had illegally accepted property worth more than 137 million yuan ($19.71 million) between 2006 and 2022, and abused his position to seek benefits for entities and individuals in areas such as company listings, land buybacks, bank loans and case handling, according to CCTV.

“Tang’s actions constituted the crime of bribery,” the court said in its ruling, adding that the sums involved were “particularly huge” and caused “particularly serious losses” to the interests of the state and the people.

Tang was also deprived of political rights for life and had all of his personal property confiscated, CCTV said.

The sentence comes as President Xi Jinping presses ahead with a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that has ensnared a string of high-ranking officials in recent weeks.

The country’s anti-graft watchdog said over the weekend it had opened a probe into Wang Xiangxi, minister of emergency management – a rare case of a sitting minister falling under investigation.

Last month, China said its top general Zhang Youxia was being investigated, in the highest-profile purge to date of senior military leadership.

Tang, 64, started his career in the eastern Zhejiang province, where he spent over three decades and rose to become the province’s deputy Communist Party chief. He later served as governor of Liaoning province before being appointed justice minister in 2020. 

Tang came under investigation in April 2024 for suspected serious violations of discipline and law, a term commonly used to refer to corruption. He was expelled from the Communist Party later that year.

($1 = 6.9512 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Ethan Wang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Aidan Lewis and Sharon Singleton)