By IANS,
Beijing : More than 540,000 Chinese officials at the grassroots level have been “punished” for discipline violations over the last five years, the government said Thursday.
Around 518,500 cases were investigated from November 2007 to February 2012, and violations were found in land expropriation, mining, education, food safety and health sectors, Xinhua cited a statement from a discipline inspection commission under the Communist Party of China as saying.
Officials in government departments, law enforcement departments, public institutions and state-owned enterprises were involved, the statement said.
Around 12,000 cases concerned the misuse of funds for social security, poverty reduction and disaster relief.
About 40,000 people were punished in 180,000 cases related to food safety. Another 170,000 cases involved production and distribution of counterfeit fertilizer and other agricultural products.