Anti-gang campaign: Female bureau chief

Jiang Ruolan wrote these down in her notebook, and then asked Zhou Pei to find the internal documents from that year and send them to her, including all the physical evidence and conversation records found at the time. No matter how many years they had been archived, they had to be dug out and re-examined.

Zhou Pei said those files were stored in the archives room on the second basement floor of the provincial department, and he would go to retrieve them that afternoon.

After hanging up the phone, Jiang Ruolan walked to the window and opened it, letting the cool night breeze in.

Outside the window, the city of Yi'an was already dotted with lights, and the tower cranes in the eastern new district were still rotating, with red and blue warning lights flashing in the night sky.

The direction of Shiqiao County in the distance was shrouded in darkness. The mines there lay silent in the night, and the sand dredgers in the river had temporarily stopped working. But after dawn, they would roar again, scooping out the sand and gravel from the riverbed, turning it into ever-growing numbers in Tang Weidong and You Chuanfu's bank accounts.

The next morning, Lu Zheng led his men to the Natural Resources Bureau of Shiqiao County.

They weren't there to arrest people; they were there to retrieve files.

Tang Weidong served as the head of the Mining Management Section for nine years, during which time he handled at least a hundred mining rights approval documents.

The task force had to find evidence of irregular approvals from these hundreds of files, a huge undertaking, equivalent to uprooting a large tree and then carefully examining every single root.

Before Lu Zheng left, Jiang Ruolan specifically called him to her office and gave him a long talk:

"Tang Weidong is not Xing Laosan. Xing Laosan makes a living with his fists; he'll back down if you scare him. Tang Weidong makes a living with his brain; he knows every document he's signed."

If you go to retrieve files, he definitely won't stop you—he might even cooperate, making you tea, making copies for you, and greeting you with a smile the whole time. But his eyes will be glued to every page you turn, mentally assessing how much you've mastered. What you need to do is let him watch—let him see what you're looking at, make him think you've gone the wrong way.

When Lu Zheng arrived at the Shiqiao County Natural Resources Bureau, Tang Weidong was already waiting in the office.

He was in his early fifties, of medium build, wearing a neatly pressed dark blue jacket, his hair combed meticulously, and silver-rimmed glasses. Behind the lenses, his eyes were not large, but they were very bright.

The office was clean and tidy, with a potted green ivy on the desk, a map of the mineral distribution of Shiqiao County hanging on the wall, and various compilations of laws and regulations and mining yearbooks neatly stacked in the bookcase.

He took the initiative to shake hands with Lu Zheng, his palm dry and strong, his smile just right—neither too enthusiastic to seem overly solicitous, nor too cold to seem distant.

He had his office staff bring over several large cardboard boxes containing approval files for all sand mining rights in the Xiahe Town section of the river over the past three years. The files were neatly arranged by year and project number, and each file had a label on its cover with the red heading "Shiqiao County Natural Resources Bureau" printed on it.

"Captain Lu, these are the files you requested. I had them prepared in advance to save you the trouble of rummaging through them box by box. All the sand mining rights transfers for the Xiahe Town section of the river over the past few years are here, from the bidding announcements to the winning bid notices, from the mining rights transfer contracts to the annual inspection records, everything is complete. If there's anything I need to add, just let me know."

Tang Weidong stood next to Lu Zheng, speaking calmly and appropriately, just like any ordinary section chief receiving a superior who came to inspect the work.

Lu Zheng took the file, thanked him, and sat down at the conference table, turning the pages one by one. Tang Weidong did not leave, but sat at the other end of the conference table, keeping him company at a distance.

He was very relaxed, occasionally picking up his teacup to take a sip. His gaze, through his glasses, fell on Lu Zheng's fingers as he flipped through the documents, like an owl perched on a branch, quietly and attentively watching everything moving on the ground.

The investigation team started with the mining rights transfer contract of Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant.

The three contracts were neatly packed in a file box, complete with their numbers, dates, page numbers, and official seals.

On the surface, the bidding process was completely compliant—the announcement period, the bidding period, and the bid evaluation period all had corresponding records and signatures.

However, upon closer inspection, the first anomaly was discovered: in the bidding for the first section of the river sand mining rights in Xiahe Town in 2021, four companies participated in the bidding, and the technical parameters of the bid documents of three of them had extremely similar wording and format.

Two companies used the exact same paragraph in the "Mining Technology Solution" section: "This project will adopt a layered mining method, peeling off the overburden layer layer by layer from top to bottom. The sand and gravel separation will adopt a three-stage screening process to ensure that the particle size classification of the sand and gravel products meets national standards."

This text, which is over 120 words long, is identical in two different companies' tender documents, with even the punctuation and line breaks being exactly the same.

The third bid document only changed two instances of the word "的" and one instance of "符合国家标准准" to "符合规范要求" in the same paragraph; the rest of the content was identical to the other two bids.

This level of similarity is not a coincidence, but a typical sign of bid rigging and collusion—the manipulators behind it distributed the same technical document templates when allocating bidding shares, but the staff at the execution level were lazy and did not do enough differentiation.

The legal representatives of these three companies are the same people Xing Laosan mentioned in his confession—his brother-in-law, his fellow inmate Lao Diao, and Lao Diao's wife.

The second anomaly appears in the coordinate table of the inflection point of the mining rights area.

This table precisely marks the boundaries of the Fusheng Sand and Gravel Quarry's mining area using latitude and longitude coordinates.

Technicians entered these coordinates one by one into the mineral resources management system of the land and resources department for comparison. The results showed that at least four mining sites of Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant had actual mining depths and areas that exceeded the boundaries stipulated in the mining license.

Three of the mining sites encroached on the farmland protection zones on both sides of the river and the foundations of villagers' self-built houses.

Although the wasteland where Fan Zhixing's pig farm is located is not within the legal mining area of ​​Fusheng, it is adjacent to its eastern boundary. In order to transport the sand and gravel mined later, Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant built a temporary transport road at the location of the pig farm. This road was never applied for in the mining license and had no land use approval procedures.

Less than a month after the access road was repaired, Fan Zhixing's pig farm was bulldozed.

Jiang Ruolan divided the evidence into three groups.

The first team, led by Lu Zheng, continued to investigate the issue of bid rigging and collusion in the bidding process, summoning all the legal representatives of the companies involved in the dummy bidding and breaking through their defenses one by one.

The second route she personally led was to find the victims whose houses and pig farms had been demolished and to retake their statements.

The third group, led by Zhao Rui, secretly investigated the financial situation of Tang Weidong and You Chuanfu, obtaining their bank statements and real estate registration records for the past ten years.

The breakthrough in the third approach came from a marriage registration file from the civil affairs department.

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