BEIJING — China has handled 278,000 criminal cases resulting from a crackdown on gangs, violence and corruption.
The “strike hard” campaign has uprooted more than 1,500 mafia-style gangs since it began late last year, the official Xinhua News Agency reported late Tuesday.
The campaign resulted in arrests of 256,000 suspects, Xinhua said. The report did not explain who the suspects were or why the number of criminal cases handled this year was higher than the number of arrests.
The nationwide campaign has also been seen as aimed at political targets — especially those in areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet, where ethnic tensions have boiled over to violence in recent years.
Last month, one of Tibet’s richest businessmen, Dorje Tashi, was sentenced to life in prison for helping exile groups. Dorje Tashi’s sentence came as a surprise, since he joined the ruling Communist Party in 2003 and was praised in local media for helping security forces after the Lhasa riots.
The “strike hard” crackdown on the southern megacity of Chongqing’s violent underworld was declared a success by its mayor this week, as thousands of arrests and trials have taken place since last year. The crackdown exposed deep links between government officials and police officers who provided cover for crime syndicates. The highest ranked person ensnared in the crackdown was former director of the city’s judicial department, who was executed in July.
The campaign also has focused on preventing repeats of a series of assaults at schools across the country that killed at least 17 youngsters and wounded more than 50. Authorities blamed them on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness.
