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Emma Ma

A local government in China has been left red-faced after it falsified land sale deals to inflate fiscal revenues amid a five-year slump in the country’s property market.
The Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said that in one case, a plot of land in Nanning, the capital of southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, was “sold” 18 times without ever actually changing hands.
The party’s top anti-corruption watchdog said the tactic allowed the city government to artificially shore up its fiscal revenue by 2.83 billion yuan (US$416.2 million) in 2024.
“Captivated by quick gains, some authorities engaged in accounting gimmicks to reflect substantial rises in fiscal revenue, masking actual budget strains”, the CCDI said in a document released late last month.
Nanning had previously transferred 15 parcels of land to three city-government-owned enterprises for free. The plots were developed, with infrastructure and public-welfare facilities, by 2024, but local officials fabricated contracts and documents that changed the free transfers into sales ranging from 840,000 to 500 million yuan per parcel, the commission said.
Nanning’s finance bureau said the city’s land sales revenue tumbled to roughly 13.2 billion yuan in 2024, just over one-fifth the figure recorded in 2020. But local authorities still set a target for 17.7 per cent annual growth in land-related fiscal revenue in 2025.
“It fully showed that some local authorities … held a grossly misplaced understanding of political achievements,” the CCDI said.
Rosy fiscal books could help local governments secure stronger credit ratings and lower borrowing costs
Luoyang audit bureau
Data from the country’s National Audit Office suggests Nanning was not an isolated case.
The office revealed last month that 21 provinces and cities had falsely inflated their fiscal revenue by a total of more than 59.6 billion yuan through irregular accounting practices last year.
One economist based in Shanghai, who asked not to be named, said the misconduct in Nanning was “driven solely by local officials’ desire to boost their promotion prospects”.
The audit bureau in Luoyang, a city in central China’s Henan province, said on its website early this year that “local officials’ performance evaluation and career advancement had been tied directly to economic expansion, with fiscal revenue serving as a core metric for gauging regional economic strength”.
“This has turned fiscal revenue into a ‘hard currency’,” it said on its website, adding that “rosy fiscal books could help local governments secure stronger credit ratings and lower borrowing costs, allowing them to obtain larger quotas for local government bond issuance and greater access to bank loans”.
Zhao Wei, chief analyst at Shanghai-based Shenwan Hongyuan Research, said last month that the slump in land sales had “become a major drag on fiscal capacity across many provinces”.
In a research report, he estimated that the total budget shortfalls of China’s provincial-level governments had ballooned to nearly 5 trillion yuan, with the severe strain “undermining local authorities’ capacity to finance investment projects”.


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Central Commission for Discipline Inspection says Nanning used tactic to mask budget strains


Central Commission for Discipline Inspection says Nanning used tactic to mask budget strains.


Chinese city ‘sold’ same plot of land 18 times to inflate fiscal revenue: watchdog

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Central Commission for Discipline Inspection says Nanning used tactic to mask budget strains

Central Commission for Discipline Inspection says Nanning used tactic to mask budget strains