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Dongguan official arrested for reported crazy land grab

By Li Wenfang (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-14 08:17

GUANGZHOU: A top township official in Dongguan, Guangdong province, who allegedly illegally purchased about 77 percent of the land in his home village via extortion and other crimes, has been arrested with the approval from the city's procuratorate.

A press official with the city's procuratorate confirmed the arrest with China Daily yesterday.

Prior to his arrest, Li Peiqin, 54, was stripped of his post as a member of the Party committee of Huangjiang Town on the suspicion that he was guilty of a "severe disciplinary violation," reported Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily.

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Before Li took the Party committee membership in 2006, he was a war veteran, secretary of the Huangjiang committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League, director of the sports commission of Huangjiang, and head of people's armed forces department of the town.

He allegedly had grabbed about 35 hectares of the 46 hectares land in his home village of Dawo in Changping Town, since 1988 by threatening others with a gun, cutting water and power supply to the land owners and users, and other forms of deception and extortion.

A petition accusing Li of land grabbing, signed by about 66 percent of the villagers and stamped with the seal of the village, first appeared on the Internet in November 2006. Later, the petition was reported in some legal news media, but there was no response.

One of the leaders of the Dawo village team, Li Zhiming, said the group had reported the case to the Dongguan city land bureau, the Changping township government and the Changping land bureau in 2006, but had received no reply.

According to some of the villagers involved in reporting the case, with the consent of all the villagers, the Dawo villagers' team reported the case to the Ministry of Land and Resources, Ministry of Public Security and the Guangdong provincial Party committee and government, among other organizations, in June this year.

Workers from the discipline inspection commission of Dongguan started to talk with villagers about the case in early August, which was followed by a survey of the land in the village by the Changping land bureau.

A report signed by the Changping Qiaoli Dawo economic cooperative and Dongguan Hualian accounting firm shows how Li Peiqin grabbed the land.

In 1998, for example, Li pulled out a gun and asked some villagers to sign a disputed land sale contract at the office of the village committee. The frightened villagers signed the contract without reviewing it.

In 2004, Li oversaw the construction of a pigsty and had a pool expanded to force the villagers to sell him parcels of land at a low price. When they rejected his offer to buy the land, Li threatened the villages, cut the water supply to some villagers, including heads of the village, and blocked the road to one of the businesses.

Li resold a number of land parcels for private house building and managed to get private house certificates without the land origin certificate signed by Dawo village authorities. He even applied for and got land and property certificates in Huangjiang Town for the land developments in Dawo.

However, the head of the Dongguan Hualian accounting firm told China Daily he did not know about the case.

Li reportedly offered a dozen men 500,000 yuan for killing Li Zhiming, who had asked him to satisfy the required procedures for the illegally obtained land, but the men did not find Li Zhiming at home.

The case was reported to the local police office, without any result, and Li Zhiming was fired soon afterwards as part-time director of a handicraft factory.