Wrongful convictions are insult to China's judicial equality: Chief Justice of Chinese Supereme Court

China's top legal authorities have said again that they will keep up anti-corruption efforts, while at the same time, take more measures to promote the rule of law in the country.

The pledges came as the country's highest court and highest prosecution agency released their annual work reports on Sunday.

Each year, the two reports are seen as a major indication on how China plans to reform its legal and judicial system over the next year.

According to Zhou Qiang, Chief Justice of China's Supreme People's Court, different levels of courts across China handled some 45-thousand cases related to bribery and corruption last year.

More than 30 corrupt officials at or above the provincial governor level were brought to justice.

The trials of several officials were highlighted, including Guo Boxiong, a former senior military leader, Ling Jihua and Su Rong, who were both vice-chairman of China's top political consultative body.

In the past, many corrupt officials were usually given a sentence reduction years after they received life imprisonment.

However, in the conviction of Bai Enpei, a senior official with the top legislature, last October, it was decided that no such leniency should be granted.

This was said to be the first time that such a harsh practice against corrupt officials had been adopted in China, a year after the country amended its criminal law in 2015.

Cao Jianming, Procurator-General of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, says the fight against corruption will continue on the legal front in 2017.

"We will not change our zero-tolerance policy towards corruption. We will focus on the crackdown on officials leveraging their power in exchange for personal gain, cheating in elections, selling or buying government positions. We will also be targeting abuse of power and corruption behaviors in the process of poverty alleviation. We will continue to hunt for those who have fled overseas," Cao said on Sunday.

In 2016, cases of wrongful conviction in China caught public attention.

In December, the country's Supreme Court reversed a lower court's ruling and proclaimed a man named Nie Shubin not guilty of raping and murdering a woman in northern Hebei Province more than 20 years ago.

The then-21-year-old Nie was executed in 1995.

Delivering his report on Sunday, Chief Justice Zhou Qiang said the story of wrongly-killed young man was an insult to judicial equality in China.

Zhou said:"We learned a painful lesson from these wrongful evictions. Therefore we must enhance accountability in handling cases, continue to improve the judicial system, and guard well the line between legal and illegal."

In China, however, some analysts believe the core issue is not on the ruling, but rather on implementation afterward.

The Supreme Court declared a war on barriers to law implementation in its work report a year ago.

This year, Chief Justice Zhou Qiang says progress is taking place:"Those barriers to implementation are being torn down. But still there will be challenging tasks. We will remain determined, establish a standardized law enforcement process, strengthen our capability in collecting information. We'll make sure this old problem will basically be resolved in two to three years."

Official figures show rulings in more than 5 million cases were successfully implemented in 2016, a year-on-year increase of 33 percent.