China Cuts 300,000 Enforcement Officers Amid Complaints of Abuse, Mounting Fiscal Stress

China’s Ministry of Justice says authorities have made significant cuts as part of a year-long campaign targeting local enforcement bodies that have arbitrarily or illegally targeted local businesses, sometimes driven by profit.Hu Weilie, the vice minister of Justice, said during a May 21 State Council Information Office press conference that the campaign ran from March 2025 to the end of March 2026. He said authorities had abolished more than 7,000 administrative enforcement bodies that did not meet legal conditions, removed more than 300,000 city code enforcement personnel who failed to meet qualification requirements, eliminated more than 400,000 unnecessary enforcement items, and trained more than 1.2 million enforcement personnel.Abuses by Local Law EnforcementHu said the campaign targeted points of conflict between local authorities and businesses: repeated inspections, arbitrary fines or fees used in place of proper regulation, excessive penalties for minor violations, improper cross-regional enforcement actions, and arbitrary seizures that tie up company assets.According to official figures presented at the press conference, administrative inspections after the campaign fell 34 percent year-on-year. Authorities investigated more than 5,500 cases involving arbitrary fines totaling 790 million yuan, or about $110 million; more than 5,900 cases involving improper fees, with more than 1.3 billion yuan, or about $181 million, returned to businesses; more than 440 cases of improper seizures, releasing nearly 2 billion yuan, or about $278 million, of assets; and more than 600 improper off-site administrative-enforcement cases.Hu also said that judicial-administrative departments worked with finance and audit agencies to monitor localities across China where fine-and-confiscation revenues had risen by more than 20 percent since the start of the campaign in March last year.Who Are the 300,000?Wu Shaoping, head of the Overseas Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Association, told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times that the 300,000 officers dismissed were largely not formal civil servants but contract workers, labor-dispatch workers, coordinators, auxiliary police, outsourced urban-management workers, and other personnel in grassroots enforcement.Wu said the Chinese authorities have long used people without formal staffing status or clear legal authority to carry out enforcement work. That arrangement, he said, reflects a governance structure in which those at the bottom perform visible enforcement tasks while formal officials maintain distance from responsibility for the enforcement actions.Chen Weimin, a mainland rights lawyer interviewed under a pseudonym out of safety concerns, described a similar pattern. He told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times that grassroots governance often operates with temporary or non-staff personnel doing the challenging enforcement work, with formal staff avoiding the burden. Those workers, he said, are poorly paid but take on tasks that are “mixed, tiring, and dirty.”The personnel category is broader than police or formal civil servants. Local enforcement in China can involve urban management personnel, auxiliary police, market regulation teams, transport inspectors, street-level coordinators, outsourced contractors, and other administrative workers who enforce rules on vendors, companies, transport operators, and local neighborhoods.Temporary Workers and Blame-ShiftingThe interviewees described a familiar pattern in Chinese public life: when local enforcement abuses trigger public anger, authorities separate the formal bureaucracy from the people who carried out the visible actions.Wu described the phenomenon of “temporary workers taking the blame.” He said some localities had created enforcement bodies that were not legally authorized, while others outsourced enforcement to companies that lacked the required administrative enforcement qualifications but still collected fines under an official enforcement banner.Chen said the people impacted by the campaign were at the bottom levels of the bureaucracy, while the political and fiscal incentives above them remain in place. Although some took part in local enforcement and stability-maintenance work, he said, their rapid abandonment reflects the way the system operates: when pressure rises, the burden falls first on those with the least protection.The Ministry of Justice announced it is drafting rules on administrative enforcement personnel, including qualifications, training, certification, conduct, and accountability. Official statements also said that authorities plan to strengthen monitoring of abnormal fine-and-confiscation revenue and improve supervision of enforcement actions.Wu said those measures do not address the system’s reliance on unqualified personnel to carry out the difficult enforcement work.What the Campaign MissedThe official campaign described the cleanup in terms of administrative bodies, enforcement qualifications, and business-related enforcement abuses. But it failed to address China’s extrajudicial political enforcement networks.One example of such an entity in China is what the Falun Dafa Information Center describes as the 610 Office, named for its creation date of June 10, 1999. The office is an extrajudicial police task force created to carry out the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution campaign against the Falun Gong spiritual practice.Sarah Cook, writing for the Jamestown Foundation, traced the office to the CCP’s system of Party “leading groups,” which she described as secretive bodies that can be arbitrarily created or dissolved.Materials compiled by the China Tribunal stated that the 610 Office network extends through the CCP, Chinese government structure, and military structures, and holds authority over China’s police and judicial organs.Fiscal Stress and Profit-Driven EnforcementThe campaign comes against a backdrop of growing economic stress in China, which Beijing’s own budget documents outline as fiscal pressures such as ballooning debt, which has impacted local financing and grassroots spending guarantees.The Ministry of Finance reported in 2025 that the national general public budget revenue was 21.6 trillion yuan (about $3 trillion), down 1.7 percent from 2024. Local governments collected 12.2 trillion yuan (about $1.7 trillion) for their local budget revenues. However, local spending reached 24.4 trillion yuan (about $3.4 trillion)—almost double the revenue collected.According to the same report, Beijing took action to strengthen its government debt management, defuse hidden debt, push reform for local government financing platforms, while promoting to the grassroots the “three guarantees”—a basic livelihood, wages, and government operations. The report also said party and government organs were under stricter “tight living” requirements, including a 5 percent cut to certain central department spending categories, such as meeting fees, training, travel, office expenses, and commissioned services.The pressure has only continued into 2026. In the first quarter, local governments collected 3.66 trillion yuan (about $508 billion) in local budget revenue, while spending 6.56 trillion yuan (about $911 billion), according to Ministry of Finance data. Debt-interest spending rose 12.9 percent from a year earlier. Local government fund revenue fell 19.1 percent, while state-owned land-use-right transfer revenue fell 24.4 percent.At an April 24 Ministry of Finance press conference, Qu Fuguo, an official with the ministry’s budget department, said localities issued 1.1599 trillion yuan (about $161 billion) in new special-purpose bonds in the first quarter of 2026, up 20.8 percent from a year earlier. He said the funds were being used for project construction, supplementing government-fund financial resources, and supporting the cleanup of government arrears owed to businesses. He also said that 960.4 billion yuan (about $133 billion) in special-purpose bonds had been issued to repay hidden debt.Yang Ming, a Beijing scholar interviewed by the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times under a pseudonym, said the personnel cleanup should be read against the fiscal pressure facing local governments, whose spending is significantly exceeding their revenue. He said some local governments are already struggling to pay salaries, with some non-essential departments paying only partial wages or delaying payments by several months.Yang said the removal of personnel was not a genuine institutional optimization but a passive response to this fiscal pressure. Chen said the campaign was less about reducing burdens on ordinary people than about sacrificing bottom-level personnel as local governments struggle with generating revenue.