China Punishes Thousands of People for Illegal Land Grabs
A brief bulletin from Xinhua via people.com.cn:
China has meted out disciplinary punishments to 2,864 people and criminal penalties to 535 during the largest-scale crackdown on illegal land grabs in recent years.
Chinese authorities uncovered 31,700 cases of unlawful land seizure from Sept. 15 last year to Jan. 15, involving a total land area of 3.364 million mu (about 224,267 hectares), said Zhang Pu, deputy director of the law enforcement and supervision bureau of the Ministry of Land and Resources, on Monday.
Nearly 60 percent of the land was used before obtaining government approval. The rest was illegally rented or misappropriated, Zhang said at a press conference.
Origin: , Xinhua News Agency
