China’s top anti-graft watchdog is investigating the country’s agriculture minister, the latest high-level official to come under scrutiny.
Tang’s last public appearance was just three days before the announcement, at a rural talent conference in Xianyang, in the northwest province of Shaanxi where he inspected “innovation in the agricultural industry” and training for farmers.
In April, Tang had hosted a meeting of the party’s Central Leading Group for Inspection Work before the group inspected the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, saying the ministry would “pay great attention to” and respond to each issue the group raised.
According to publicly available information, Tang is the 11th delegate to the party’s national congress in October 2022 and the first member of the 20th Central Committee to be investigated.
Tang, 61, started his political career in the agriculture ministry in the 1980s. He worked in various roles in the sector and moved on to working in provincial governments, including Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and Gansu province.
In December 2020, he was appointed agriculture minister.
The law is designed to maintain the independence and control of the country’s “germplasm resources”, the genetic materials needed for plant cultivation. It covers protection of IP rights in the seed industry, including safeguards for new plant variety rights and compensation for rights infringement.
Previously, Tang had firmly supported this push. In January 2021, as the newly installed minister, he issued a to-do list to improve the country’s crop production that year, including increasing corn acreage and self-sufficiency in edible soybeans.
The following month, China rolled out its annual blueprint for rural policies amid Covid-19, with an emphasis on using new agricultural technologies.
At the time, Tang called to “raise the safety factor as high as possible, and produce and store as much grain as possible”.
