Grubby Land Grab

It's become an old story in modern China: Local government officials get rich quick by ignoring property laws and grabbing land rights from hapless farmers. The shenanigans go unpunished and perhaps unnoticed beyond the borders of the village, district or county they're supposed to serve.

In some cases, though, regulators catch wind of wrongdoing and nail local officials responsible for illegal land requisitions. And that's what happened in Hebei Province to Xianghe County Magistrate Zhang Guijin and several other local officials.

Zhang is likely to be sacked after an investigation team from the Hebei Province Department of Land & Resources and Beijing Bureau of State Land Supervision recently found sufficient evidence that he orchestrated a farmland grab in the county, 45 kilometers east of Beijing, in behalf of high-value property development.