to the government.

China fights corruption within ruling party

In the report, chief justice Zhou also praised President Xi Jingping's anti-graft campaign, which he said saw the number of corruption cases tried in China's courts last year rise by about a third from 2015.



Xi has presided over a much-publicised crackdown on rampant government corruption since coming to power in 2012, with more than one million officials punished in what some compare to a political purge.



In 2016, Chinese courts heard 45,000 graft cases involving 63,000 people, up from 34,000 cases in 2015.



For overall hearings, the Supreme People's Court heard nearly 23,000 cases and local courts heard some 23 million last year, with only 1,076 defendants found not guilty, according to data cited by Zhou.

OPINION: Curbing Chinese corruption

In a separate report tothe assembly, China’s top prosecutor, Cao Jianming, said that the government last year initiated investigations against 47,650 people for taking advantage of their official posts. He said 48 officials above the rank of minister were prosecuted, including Ling Jihua, a former chief of staff to ex-President Hu Jintao who was sentenced to life in prison in July for taking bribes, illegally obtaining state secrets and abusing power.

China: Activist Hu Shigen jailed for 'subversion'

Zhou Qiang also said that China, which is believed to execute more people than the rest of the world combined, gave the death penalty “to an extremely small number of criminals for extremely serious offences” in the past 10 years.

The actual number of executions in China is a state secret. A 2007 decision that all death