China executed a former central bank official for his...

China executed a former central bank official for his part in stealing nearly 15.5 million yuan ($1.9 million), the official Xinhua news agency said.
Chen Zhiqing, an official with the state treasury department at a People's Bank of China branch in the remote and impoverished northwest province of Qinghai, embezzled the money using tax refunds, fake transfers and false receipts, Xinhua said. The case was the biggest involving the state treasury since the founding of Communist China in 1949, and the biggest graft scandal of any kind in Qinghai, Xinhua said.
The ruling Communist Party has vowed to wipe out corruption, seeing it as a threat to its legitimacy, and state media often reports on arrests and trials of corrupt officials. Nine others schemed with Chen between 1992 and 1997, but the crimes were only uncovered in 1999, Xinhua said.
Appeals and procedural twists had tied Chen's case up in court for several years before the Supreme People's Court, China's highest judicial authority, upheld his death sentence earlier in May, the agency reported.