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Phoebe Zhang

During a crackdown on organised crime, Zeng Jianbin, a real estate developer in Mianyang, in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for being a “gang leader”.
In 2023, the Mianyang Intermediate People’s Court convicted Zeng of nine offences, including provoking trouble, illegal lending at high interest and intentional destruction of property. His sentence was particularly harsh because of the organised crime accusations.
But two years later, during his appeal trial at the provincial higher court, prosecutors admitted that Zeng’s case did not involve organised crime and suggested that his sentence be modified, according to a report by Chinese media outlet Caixin. Zeng’s company, the Sanhui Group, grew out of legitimate business and was not established for criminal purposes as previously alleged, the prosecutors said.
This May, the higher court sent the case back to Mianyang for a retrial, concluding that there was not enough evidence to justify treating the case as gang-related.
This is the type of case that legal experts are worried could recur, as authorities launched a fresh year-long crackdown on “gang-related crimes” last month.
Only 10 days after the announcement of the latest crackdown, Chinese police said they had already rounded up more than 8,000 suspects, among them people accused of using malicious complaints against online shops to extort money or of staging fake traffic accidents.


China’s fight against organised crime can be traced back to as early as the 2000s, but in 2018 official rhetoric started to include calls for a systematic “sweeping away” of gangs and their “protective umbrellas”, meaning the officials who shield them.
A State Council statement in 2018 said that launching a nationwide special campaign to combat organised crime and root out local gangs was a “major decision made by the Communist Party Central Committee with comrade Xi Jinping at its core” and that it was related to “social stability and the country’s long-term peace and order”.
That three-year campaign led to 3,584 gangs being broken up, equivalent to the total number from the 10 years before the crackdown began, the authorities said, adding that 81,400 cases of corruption and official collusion were investigated.
Among them were a number of high-profile cases. Sun Xiaoguo – who was described by state news agency Xinhua as a “notorious gang leader” – was executed in February 2020. He was a serial rapist who terrorised Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, also in southwestern China, in the 1990s and 2010s. He was protected by his parents, who were police officers.
But some Chinese legal experts warned some cases were improperly handled to meet quotas during these special crackdowns. Guo Rui, a criminal lawyer at the Beijing-based BZW Law Firm, said that she had seen real estate developers, jade market founders and even village officials getting charged with gang-related crimes in the past three years.
“Criminal prosecution was used in some civil disputes, and in a few cases, torture and coerced confessions were used to fabricate the legal characteristics of a gang,” she said.


According to Chinese law, a case is determined to be “gang-related” when the suspects are members of an organised group, obtain economic gains through their activities, use violence or coercion, and disrupt economic and social order.
The announcement of the new crackdown would pose many challenges for criminal lawyers, according to another Beijing-based lawyer who wished to stay anonymous. The number of cases would certainly increase, but lawyers would have less room to defend their clients once the cases had been labelled “gang-related”, he said.
Furthermore, he expected there could be profit-driven enforcement at the local level, including authorities seizing or freezing assets to force confessions.
Senior officials have said the crackdown would strictly abide by laws and would be evidence-based. Last week, an official with the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission told People’s Daily that the police should also strictly follow procedures and collect evidence that proved gang-related crimes. Law enforcement should safeguard all rights of suspects as well as lawyers, they added.
Zhao Cong, a Beijing-based lawyer, told Caixin magazine that there needed to be a mechanism for independent reviews of cases labelled as “gang-related” to prevent wrongful convictions.
Guo, the criminal lawyer, said the easiest way to ensure that cases were not mishandled was for courts to refuse illegally obtained evidence, including any extracted through torture and coercion.
“Police should handle cases in strict accordance with the law, prosecutors [should] review them, and the courts judge all [cases] based on evidence,” she said. “They should neither wrong the innocent nor let the guilty escape.”


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Police in China’s eastern Zhejiang province round up a members of a gang accused of carrying out online loan scams. Photo: Xinhua

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Photo: CCTV

News

China

Politics

Lawyers say that officials trying to meet quotas are improperly labelling crimes as gang-related and even turning to torture


Lawyers say that officials trying to meet quotas are improperly labelling crimes as gang-related and even turning to torture.


Xi Jinping

Central Committee

As China launches new gang crackdown, lawyers fear wrongful convictions

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Lawyers say that officials trying to meet quotas are improperly labelling crimes as gang-related and even turning to torture

Lawyers say that officials trying to meet quotas are improperly labelling crimes as gang-related and even turning to torture