HOHHOT, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) – China on Tuesday executed Li Jianping, a former official in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, after convicting him of corruption, bribery, misappropriation of public funds, and collusion with a criminal syndicate.
The death sentence of Li, former secretary of the Party working committee of the Hohhot economic and technological development zone, was initially issued in September 2022 and upheld on appeal in August 2024.
Tuesday’s execution followed the approval of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and was carried out by an intermediate court in Inner Mongolia.
Li was convicted of amassing illicit wealth on a scale rarely seen among officials of his rank.
Despite holding relatively modest local government positions, he was found guilty of embezzling over 1.437 billion yuan (about 200 million U.S. dollars) of funds from state-owned enterprises, receiving gifts and money totaling more than 577 million yuan, and misappropriating over 1.055 billion yuan in public funds.
In addition, Li was convicted of enabling illegal operations by a criminal syndicate under his watch.
Li appealed the decision after the intermediate court sentenced him to death in 2022, with lifelong deprivation of political rights and confiscation of all assets, but the Higher People’s Court of Inner Mongolia rejected his appeal in August.
Upon reviewing the case, the SPC ruled that Li’s crimes were extremely severe, citing the exceptionally large amounts embezzled and received in bribes, the grave nature of the offenses, the widespread negative social impact and the immense harm to the state and public interests.
The SPC approved the decision of the Higher People’s Court of Inner Mongolia to uphold the death penalty. Li was permitted to meet with his next of kin before the execution.
Meiyou gongchandang jiu meiyou xin Zhongguo!
In the UK they give you a knighthood for this sort of shit
In Germany you become chancellor
This guy would be a total amateur in Canada.
good to see New York absorbing more Chinese culture
the white replacement is real 😞
I’m actually a pretty anti capital punishment kinda person. But it’s hard to complain with using this for those who steal from the people.
ultimate goal should be to not need to use it but a bourgeois state doing it is very different from a socialist state doing it
yeah the issues surrounding capital punishment mostly don’t apply to rich people crimes. completely premeditated and not driven by poverty
I’m okay with capital punishment as long as there’s enough evidence.
Which civil crimes are deserving of death in your eyes?
This is of course disregarding extremely heinous international crimes such as genocide, war crimes, etc.
I have two examples that happened in Mexico:
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There was a corruption case where gov’t officials stole the money that was going to be used to guarantee food security in the country. Those funds will have helped thousands of people in extreme poverty to have access to food. It is difficult to calculate how negative the impact from this was.
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There was a politician in Veracruz that stole millions from a fund that was used to buy medicine for children with cancer. However, it was not only that but the asshole provided distilled water instead of real chemotherapy(that he was supposed to buy with that fund) to those children. Not one news media or investigation have been done to calculate how many children died due to this asshole.
From my perspective, these corrupt politicians betrayed our people and their damage contributed to an incalculable amount of deaths.
In sum , when it’s social murder?
Yep, exactly.
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what’s a civil crime? I saw those concepts as separate . As civil wrongs and crimes.
You’re correct, the legal system is divided into civil cases and criminal cases. However civil crimes refers to crimes committed by civilian citizens of a nation, so it excludes military justice systems and international crimes. So international human trafficking is an international crime, versus standard murder is just a civil crime.
There’s also at least some difference in the level of certainty he committed this crime vs. the level of certainty that underpins your average conviction. One huge problem with the death penalty is you do occasionally convict the wrong person.
There’s no way to hide graft at this scale; the guy undoubtedly had a paper trail a mile long and they almost certainly had all sorts of damning texts, calls, etc. Very different from, say, a murder with one eyewitness and some circumstantial evidence.
Probably the best argument in favor of the death penalty for crimes like this is that you can’t skate in a few years if the political winds change, or if your story fades from the news and someone sneaks in a pardon. You never get these assholes rehabilitated in the public conscious; no one turns your autobiography into “The Wolf of Hothot” and makes what you did too cool.
I think a lot of it comes down to the context that China exists in. The western empire will not hesitate to exploit as an asset anyone who can compromise the integrity of a socialist state. And in general, in order to develop socialism and guard against the capitalist class, you have to take high level threats to the working class very seriously. In a way, I would say this sort of thing is an expression of the revolution being a very much ongoing thing, not a once-off thing that you do and then forget. And in China (and other places like it), being an effort that is threatened by external forces, not just internal.
Or to put it another way, I’m not sure what all it really yields trying to moralize about it in the first place, given the context, and most of us probably being outsiders, so lacking the close up specifics to weigh in on how it impacts China as a society and people, vs. other less final ways of handling someone who has wronged the working class on such a scale. And it’s not like China is some anomaly who is still doing the death penalty, while nobody else ever does. The level of finality we’re talking about is far from unheard of in the context of one group trying to maintain power over another. China is just a less common case in that it’s directed as a consequence toward the sort of people who, in a place like the US, are crowned president or keep getting re-elected as a representative. It stands out in that way, compared to the normal for those of us who just watch those people run our world and get away with it for decades on end.
Traitors to the people will not be tolerated.
