A Chinese court has jailed the former deputy head of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration for life, convicting 63-year-old Li Chunliang of taking more than 87.7 million yuan (US$12.2 million) in bribes and influence-peddling payments across two decades of party and forestry posts. That is according to a verdict announcement carried by China News Service, with the Dezhou Intermediate People’s Court in Shandong handing down the first-instance sentence on Wednesday, 22 July.
Alongside life imprisonment for bribery, judges imposed four years and a 300,000 yuan fine for influence peddling, folding both penalties into a single life term that strips his political rights permanently and seizes all of his personal property. Every criminal gain, plus the interest earned on it, must now be recovered and paid into the state treasury.
Judges traced the bribery from the second half of 2002 to May 2022, finding Li used senior posts inside the party’s Central Organization Department and later the forestry administration to help associates win contracts, gain promotions, and secure project approvals. In return, Li took more than 84.65 million yuan, sums the court ruled “especially huge” and severely damaging to the state and the people.
Retirement did not stop the payments, with the court finding that Li collected a further 3.05 million yuan between October 2023 and December 2024 by leaning on serving officials to push through approvals for third parties. The conduct began within months of his 2023 exit from the agency, where he had served as deputy director since 2018.
Li was spared a harsher penalty because he cooperated, with judges crediting his confession, his disclosure of bribes that investigators had not yet uncovered, his surrender on the influence-peddling charge, and the return of every illicit gain. He pleaded guilty and expressed remorse when the case went to trial in Dezhou on 29 April, before more than 20 lawmakers, political advisers, and members of the public.
Li reached forestry late in a career built inside the party…
A soldier before he was a cadre, the Hebei-born official left the People’s Liberation Army for the party’s Central Organization Department in 1997, rising through the body that controls appointments across the Chinese state. Caixin Global counts his career in decades, spanning postings in Beijing and Jiangxi until a 2016 shift to the forestry portfolio, two years before the shake-up that folded the old State Forestry Administration into the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
Investigators moved on Li in May 2025, two years after he left office, and the party expelled him last November. “Li lost his ideals and convictions and betrayed his original mission,” the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in its expulsion notice, accusing him of frequenting private clubs, accepting gifts and cash, borrowing money from businesspeople he oversaw, and taking free renovations on his home.
According to the watchdog, Li turned public power into a tool for private gain, trading it for money across company deals, project contracts, and licensing approvals, and refusing to stop even after President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive began in 2012.
High-level falls remain rare across China’s forestry and grassland system, and Chinese media rank Li among the most senior officials caught since the agency was created. Six months before the verdict, the same watchdog opened a probe into Zhang Jianlong, the administration’s founding director and Li’s long-time colleague, for suspected serious breaches of discipline and law.
Charged with running the world’s largest planted forest estate, the agency sets China’s annual harvest quotas, enforces the ban on commercial felling in natural forests, and manages the national park system alongside the Three-North shelterbelt, known as the Great Green Wall.
The verdict comes five days before APEC forestry ministers gather in Shenzhen for the first forestry ministerial on Chinese soil in 15 years, where the APFNet Coordination Centre, an affiliate of Li’s old agency, will promote more than $45 million of forest demonstration projects across the Asia-Pacific.
