Customs keeping busy with smugglers

Anti-smuggling departments across the country handled 1,058 smuggling cases in the first three months of this year, up 92.7 percent year-on-year, according to the General Administration of Customs.

The administration said that 718 of the handled cases were related to taxes, such as smuggling refined oil products, diamonds, gold and cigarettes, with these cases involving 24.4 billion yuan ($3.76 billion).

In a released case, the anti-smuggling bureau of Nanning Customs in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region teamed up with local departments in March and arrested 11 suspects in a cigarette smuggling case, seizing more than 2,400 cartons.

Later, the investigation showed that the group had smuggled about 12,000 cartons since February 2019, with a value of about 80 million yuan.

In the first quarter, anti-smuggling departments also handled 153 drug smuggling cases, an increase of 71.9 percent year-on-year, and seized about 458 kilograms of cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs.

They continued to strengthen supervision at ports and promoted international law enforcement cooperation to maintain a severe crackdown on the smuggling of endangered species and relevant products such as ivory and pangolin scales.

A total of 64 cases of smuggling of endangered species and relevant products were investigated in the first quarter, up 16.4 percent year-on-year.

China's anti-smuggling customs departments have also strengthened the crackdown on the smuggling of solid waste, epidemic prevention materials, guns and agricultural products.

In Guangdong province, customs investigated five solid waste smuggling cases, involving 506 metric tons of waste, from January to March.

More efforts were also made to return such waste, with 36 orders of it successfully returned, thus safeguarding environmental security.

China has imposed a ban on importing solid waste in any form and has forbidden the dumping, stacking and disposal of foreign solid waste in the country since Jan 1, according to a circular released by the ministries of Ecology and Environment and Commerce, the National Development and Reform Commission and the General Administration of Customs in November.