The Crimes and the Verdict
A Chinese court has handed down a rare death sentence with a two-year reprieve to Long Xiang, the former Party secretary and chairman of the Standing Committee of the Nanjing Municipal People’s Congress. The verdict, delivered on August 11 by the Jingzhou Intermediate People’s Court in Hubei Province, caps a sprawling case that combined massive bribery, embezzlement, abuse of power, and insider trading.
Prosecutors found that between 2009 and 2025, Long exploited a series of senior posts—including deputy secretary of the Nanjing Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection, director of the Municipal Supervision Bureau, and eventually the city’s top legislative position—to accept bribes totaling 261 million yuan in cash and valuables. In return, he helped companies and individuals secure engineering contracts, facilitate government payments, and influence the handling of disciplinary cases.
The court also established that Long conspired with others to defraud 12 million yuan in fiscal support funds from the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone between 2014 and 2016. During the same period, while supervising serious disciplinary investigations, he deliberately shielded individuals from prosecution, causing severe damage to public property and state interests. Additionally, between November 2017 and January 2018, Long illegally obtained inside information and used it to purchase shares in a listed company, with a cumulative transaction value exceeding 10.05 million yuan.
Despite the gravity of the offenses, the court cited significant mitigating factors. Long provided major meritorious service by exposing other crimes, confessed to most bribery charges not previously known to investigators, and voluntarily disclosed the embezzlement—an act treated as self-surrender on that count. He expressed remorse, and all illicit gains from bribery and embezzlement were recovered. These factors allowed the court to impose a suspended death sentence rather than immediate execution, while still ordering the confiscation of all personal property and substantial fines.
Why Long Xiang’s Sentence Matters
The Suspended Death Penalty: A Narrow Escape
Under Chinese law, a death sentence with a two-year reprieve typically means the sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment after the period, provided the convict does not commit further intentional crimes. For Long, the outcome reflected the court’s balancing of the “extremely huge” bribe amount and “especially significant” harm to public interests against his cooperation and restitution. In recent high-level corruption trials, similar combinations of massive sums and post-arrest cooperation have often resulted in death with reprieve—a signal that no amount of service record or confession fully absolves the most egregious graft.
The Insider Trading Element
Long’s case is unusual among senior-official trials for including a conviction for insider trading. The offense, committed while he served as the city’s top disciplinary inspector, involved trading on confidential information about a listed company. The court characterized the act as “serious,” yet the five-year prison term and 1 million yuan fine will be absorbed into the overall capital sentence. The conviction nonetheless highlights the expanding scope of anti-corruption probes to cover financial crimes by public officials, reinforcing that abuse of access to market-sensitive information is treated as severely as traditional bribery.
Overall, the case reinforces Beijing’s message that the anti-graft campaign reaches deep into provincial power structures and that even top local officials cannot bank on political seniority for leniency without extraordinary cooperation.
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