Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday met with representatives of those honored for their outstanding work in China's campaign to fight organized and gang-related crimes in the past three years as the country busted 3,644 gang-related organizations, which were 1.3 times the total during the decade before 2018.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, expressed congratulations to the representatives, who were attending a gathering in Beijing to celebrate the victory of the campaign, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday.

Speaking at the event, Guo Shengkun, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and head of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the CPC Central Committee, said the fight against such illegal activities should be advanced on a regular basis. Guo called for greater efforts to implement the Peaceful China initiative.

The Global Times learned on the website of the Chinese government that 200 groups have been honored for their contribution to the campaign, including the working team to investigate the Sun Xiaoguo case in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. 

Sun, born in 1977, was a convicted rapist who was sentenced to death two decades ago but was found to be at large and allegedly the leader of a criminal gang in 2019. 

He was executed on February 20, 2020. 

Cooperation between different provinces and regions as well as cooperation with foreign countries played a role in the campaign. 

When police officers in Wanzhou district, Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, tried to trace some members of a local gang in 2018, they found the suspects had fled to Myanmar. 

The Wanzhou police officers thus cooperated with police in Yunnan and Myanmar and finally arrested the suspects in August 2018 in Myanmar after months of investigation, according to media reports. 

As to another member of the gang surnamed Chen who had fled to Israel, the Wanzhou police tried to contact his relatives and asked them to persuade Chen to come back and turn himself in. They succeeded finally. 

Members of the gang were sentenced to jail terms of 22 months to 23 years for crimes including illegal border crossings, illegal gun possession and illegally running gambling houses.   

In 2018, China initiated a three-year campaign to crack down on organized and gang-related crimes. Significant results have been achieved over the past three years.

The Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) announced on Monday that during the past three years, 3,644 gang-related organizations and 11,675 criminal gangs were busted, and 149,000 individuals were arrested. These achievements of were 1.3 times the total during the decade before 2018, the SPP said.

This campaign this time around was different from earlier ones. During previous campaigns, only obvious criminals were cracked down on. But this time, both gang-related organizations and criminal groups - as well as their "protective umbrellas" - were busted, Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Research Center for Government Integrity-Building at Peking University, told the Global Times on Monday.

"This time, the campaign concentrated on breaking through the protection that some civil servants are providing to organizations and gangs," Zhuang said, noting that cracking down on the "protective umbrella" is the core of the fight against organized and gang-related crimes.

In one of a six-part documentary of the campaign, broadcast on Saturday by China Central Television, Xi Changyuan,  66, a retired senior official in Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning Province, was revealed to have abused his position to help and protect his family companies, which are deeply engaged in gang-related crimes. 

More than 2,700 estates, 43 pieces of land, 46 companies and 142 vehicles were involved in Xu's case, according to the documentary. 

The Saturday documentary also revealed a criminal gang in Lanzhou, Northwest China's Gansu Province, whose usurious practices led to more than 390,000 victims and the suicides of 89 among the borrowers due to their unbearable debt burdens.

"The real beneficiary of the campaign is the general public. Only when the 'protective umbrellas' are pulled away can the gang-related crimes be eliminated and the public be assured," Zhuang said.

Since China started the campaign, procuratorial departments across the country have targeted illegal activities in employment, real estate, medicine and transportation, as well as other sectors that concern the public.

To ensure that all arrests and charges are sufficiently supported by evidence, and to prevent wrongful convictions, procuratorial departments disapproved the arrests of 11,237 individuals and withdrew charges against 2,814 after reviewing evidence during this period, SPP statistics showed.