Tang Renjian, China’s former minister of agriculture, was found guilty of bribery and given a death sentence with remission

Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, reported that Tang Renjian, who used to be Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, was given a death sentence with a chance to appeal for bribery at a court in Jilin province on Sunday.

Xinhua said Tang took bribes worth more than 268 million yuan ($37.6 million) in cash and property in different jobs he held from 2007 to 2024.

It was said that the Changchun Intermediate People’s Court put off his death sentence for two years because he had admitted to his crimes.

China’s Communist Party kicked Tang out in November 2024, six months after the anti-graft body took him off the job and put him under investigation.

Tang’s investigation went very quickly compared to the ones that were done on Li Shangfu, the defense minister, and Wei Fenghe, who was his boss.

In 2020, President Xi Jinping began a campaign to clean up China’s domestic security system. He wanted to make sure that the police, prosecutors, and judges are “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, and absolutely reliable.”

According to government biographies, Tang was governor of Gansu, a province in western China, from 2017 to 2020. After that, he was named minister of agriculture and rural affairs.

As of January, Xi said that graft is still the biggest threat to the Chinese Communist Party and is getting worse.