China has sentenced a former senior government official to death after convicting him of amassing more than 2.2 billion yuan (about $325 million) in bribes over three decades, in one of the country’s most staggering corruption scandals in recent history.
The Changzhou Intermediate People’s Court in eastern China handed down the death sentence to 69-year-old Yang Youlin, a former top official in Nanjing, after finding him guilty of bribery, embezzlement, abuse of power and money laundering.
The court ruled that Yang exploited his influential positions between 1993 and 2023 to build a vast corruption network, using public office as a tool for personal enrichment. Prosecutors said he accepted enormous sums of money and expensive gifts from individuals and companies in exchange for facilitating engineering contracts, land transfers, financing approvals and other government favours.
According to the court, Yang’s illicit dealings generated more than 2.2 billion yuan in illegal proceeds, making the case one of the largest financial corruption prosecutions in China in recent years.
Describing the offences as “extremely serious,” the court held that Yang’s actions inflicted “exceptionally heavy losses to the interests of the state and the people,” adding that the scale of the crimes left no room for judicial leniency.
Although Yang cooperated with investigators, pleaded guilty and expressed remorse during the trial, the court ruled that the enormity of his crimes outweighed all mitigating factors, making him ineligible for a reduced sentence.
The conviction marks another high-profile milestone in President Xi Jinping’s relentless anti-cor corruption campaign, which has swept through China’s political, military and financial establishments since he assumed office. The campaign has led to the investigation, prosecution and punishment of thousands of officials accused of abusing public office for personal gain.
Beijing has consistently defended the crackdown as a determined effort to eradicate corruption, strengthen public institutions and restore confidence in government. Critics, however, argue that the campaign has also served as a political instrument for removing rivals and consolidating Xi’s grip on power.
While executions for economic and financial crimes remain relatively rare in China, authorities have shown a willingness to impose the harshest punishment in cases involving exceptionally large-scale corruption.
In 2021, former state-owned financial executive Lai Xiaomin was executed after being convicted of accepting 1.8 billion yuan in bribes. More recently, former Inner Mongolia official Li Jianping was executed in 2024 after being found guilty of embezzlement and accepting bribes worth more than 3 billion yuan.
Chinese courts frequently impose suspended death sentences in corruption cases, which may later be commuted to life imprisonment if the convict demonstrates good behaviour or provides substantial assistance to investigators. However, in cases deemed especially egregious, courts have continued to reserve the death penalty as the ultimate sanction against officials found to have betrayed the public trust on a massive scale.