China: A former Chinese cabinet minister was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in a high-level bribery case that has exposed rampant corruption in the country's profit-oriented dictatorship.
Amid leadership fears that endemic corruption is undermining the legitimacy of the Communist party, a Beijing court convicted Tian Fengshan, who was fired as minister of land and resources in 2003, of accepting bribes of 4.4 million yuan (€450,000).
The highest level bribery trial in four years was hailed by the state-controlled media as a sign that the authorities were cracking down on influence-peddling and illegal land transfers.
But Tian was spared the death penalty. The court said it had been "lenient" because the defendant had confessed and helped police recover illegally obtained assets. Tens of thousands of communist cadres have been sacked, fined, imprisoned or executed for corruption in recent years, but it is rare for such a senior figure to be implicated.
Before Tian joined the cabinet, he was governor of Heilongjiang, a province bigger than many countries with a population of more than 38 million people. From 1995 to 2000 he oversaw a system oiled by bribery.
He came under police scrutiny when a Communist Party associate, Ma De, admitted paying him 100,000 yuan in 1999 for helping to arrange financing for a broadcasting facility.
In a sign of systematic influence-peddling, Ma said he had paid 800,000 yuan for his post as a local party secretary. After getting the job, he then sold other positions for 24 million yuan. As the case widened, it decimated the top level of the Heilongjiang administration.
According to the Communist Party's anti-corruption watchdog, the central commission for discipline inspection, nearly 50,000 officials have been prosecuted and punished in the past two years.
He Yong, deputy secretary of the commission, recently said the number of corruption cases was declining, but those involving senior officials were on the increase. - (Guardian service)