BEIJING - A Chinese court on Thursday sentenced a former provincial-level official to 16-year prison for bribery and abuse of power. Liao Shaohua, former official in southwest China's Guizhou Province, was tried by the Intermediate People's Court in Xi'an, capital city of Shaanxi Province.
Liao is one of the hundreds ‘big tigers’ who had been hunted under the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.  After taking office in 2013, President Xi Jinping initiated a drive against corruption that targeted both ‘tigers and ‘flies’, respectively referring to senior corrupt officials and low-ranking corrupt officials.
Under the anti-graft campaign, hundreds of thousands ‘tigers’ and ‘flies’ of all levels have been snared to date. According to Central Commission of Discipline Inspection, Communist Party’s powerful watchdog, it had executed cases of more than 70 high-level officials while punished more than 70,000 officials for violating anti-graft rules since the launch of the campaign.
In Liao’s case, the court handed down the first-trial sentence and ordered confiscation of property belonging to Liao worth 1.3 million yuan (209,600 U.S. dollars).
Liao served as a member of the standing committee of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China. He also acted as Party Secretary in Zunyi City before a discipline investigation was launched in 2013. On April 3, Former security chief Zhou Yongkang was charged with bribery, abuse of power and intentional disclosure of State secrets.
He is most senior official prosecuted in decades and setting the stage for a trial. Zhou, 73, served as deputy general manager of China National Petroleum Corp, secretary of the Communist Party of China Sichuan Provincial Committee, and was a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee while minister of public security and a State councilor.
In 2012, he retired after serving as a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and secretary of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the CPC Central Committee.
Zhou took advantage of his posts to influence others and illegally accepted a huge amount of money and property, according to the indictment.
According to Chinese official news agency, a senior Chinese military officer has been detained on suspicion of corruption last month. Xinhua reported that Beijing's legislature approved a proposal from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for ‘coercive measures’ against Major General Liu Hongjie, who was in-charge of logistic support, on corruption charges.
The move had to be submitted by military procuratorate of the PLA General Staff Headquarters prosecutors and approved by the 14th standing committee of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress, because Liu is one of its serving deputies.
Liu had been placed under ‘coercive measures’ as he was suspected of having abused his power and taken bribes in 2013, the military procuratorate was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
According to the media reports, China has also launched probes into more than a dozen senior PLA officials on serious graft charges during the country's anti-graft drive and President Xi, who is also the chairman of the Central Military Commission, vowed to eradicate corruption in China's armed forces.
Xu Caihou, former vice-chairman of China's Central Military Commission (CMC), confessed to taking huge bribes after PLA prosecutors completed investigating him in late October last year and began filing the case. Xu is the highest-level PLA officer to be investigated and charged in more than 30 years.
Gao Xiaoyan, deputy political commissar and chief of discipline inspection at PLA Information Engineering University, has been placed under internal investigation for alleged corruption in late 2014. Gao is believed to be the first female general to be investigated since the new leadership took office.
Yang Jinshan, lieutenant general of the PLA ground force and former deputy commander of the Chengdu Military Command was expelled from the Party in last October for gravely violating internal discipline.
Gu Junshan, deputy head of the PLA general logistics department, was charged with embezzlement, bribery, misuse of state funds and abuse of power in March last year.
Other high-ranking officers probed include Dai Weimin, deputy president of PLA Nanjing Political College; Ye Wanyong, former political commissar of the Sichuan Provincial Military Command; and Wei Jin, deputy political commissar of the Tibet Military Command. All are PLA ground force major generals.
A former Chinese diplomat was placed under investigation in the anti-graft campaign as he was suspected of violating discipline. Mr Zhang was the most senior of the county’s four assistant foreign ministers.
Likewise, dozens of other high officials are under investigations or facing the trial for corruption or violating the discipline.