Police crack down on food, drug, environment, and IP rights offenses

Police in China investigated as many as 91,000 criminal cases in the fields of food and medicine safety, intellectual property rights, and environment in 2024, the Ministry of Public Security said.

The ministry has carried out special campaigns in recent years to crack down harshly on crimes of illegal occupation and destruction of farmland, including black soil, as well as the production and sales of fake agricultural supplies, such as seeds, pesticides and fertilizers.

In September last year, the ministry disclosed six typical cases, one of which was detected in April in Fushun, Northeast China's Liaoning province, where local police captured 16 suspects who had allegedly mined more than 7,700 cubic meters of black soil peat and sold it to other provinces.

In another case, police in Zibo, Shandong province, dismantled three organizations producing and selling counterfeit pesticides in May, seizing more than 730 metric tons of the counterfeit goods.

Responding to the public's call for improved food safety, the ministry launched special campaigns in 2024 to target a series of offenses related to the production, processing and sales of food, such as meat and oil, as well as the crime of adding excessive additives or non-edible products in food.

Four agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security, jointly launched in April a campaign focusing on illegal production and sales of meat products.

By the end of November, the campaign had seen police crack more than 2,400 criminal cases, and capture more than 6,000 suspects.

Authorities across the country had investigated more than 2,700 cases involving untraceable, uninspected or non-conforming meat, and cracked more than 1,000 cases of fake meat products, said the State Administration for Market Regulation, also one of the four agencies.

Over the past year, the country's police also continued their crack down on counterfeits of other key products bearing on public safety, such as firefighting equipment, gas equipment, construction material and electric bikes.

They also carried out operations to tackle crimes of environmental pollution in key areas such as national parks and Yangtze and Yellow rivers, illegal mining of rare earth, damaging ancient trees and illegal hunting.

Police across the country will keep up high pressure on offenses related to food, drug, environment, and intellectual property rights by continuing the special campaigns in the year to come, the Ministry of Public Security said.