The Communist Party has urged rural party cells to ease the tax burden on peasants after widespread unrest.
The Legal Daily said an investigation carried out in Anhui, Henan and Jilin provinces found 4,800 cases of peasants refusing to pay excessive 'burdens'.
The paper said: 'The investigation showed that wherever the peasants are forced to pay extra fees, money is misappropriated or there are serious problems of embezzlement and extravagance.' Local leaders often refused to respond to peasants' complaints, which often turned trivial cases into serious ones and serious cases into unrest, the paper said.
The report quoted a party leader in Jilin who admitted rural cadres often forced peasants to pay fees by seizing their property and dealing with them rudely or harshly.
'This makes the relationship between cadres and peasants tense, making it impossible to carry out normal work, let alone deal with emergency cases,' the official said.
Investigators in Chuzhou county in Anhui found 228 local cadres had embezzled 590,000 yuan (HK$550,000) in local government finances, and that a further 2,000 had misappropriated a total of 3.4 million yuan.
Local officials had seized property worth 800,000 yuan and squandered 22 million yuan on expenses.
