The Communist Party of China’s (CPC) top disciplinary watchdog said Sunday around 1.343 million grassroots-level Party officials around the country had been punished between the time of the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012 and the end of June this year.

These officials served at the town- or township-level or lower, including 648,000 village officials, according to a statement by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

The CCDI said this demonstrates the Party has extended its strict governance to grassroots-level organizations.

As of this August, the CCDI had dealt with 270 problems in 21 county-level administrative regions, carrying out several rounds of supervision on poverty-alleviation work.

The CCDI has made public 33 typical cases of corruption in poverty relief work.

The CCDI said it had conducted inspection and supervision of 155,000 Party organizations in the past five years, transferring 65,000 pieces of evidence about problems involving officials for further investigation.

A male college professor who assaulted a female street cleaner in his community was detained and fined by the police on Saturday in Xi’an, Shaanxi province.

Xi’an police released a statement on Sina Weibo saying the professor, surnamed Ge, would be detained for 10 days and face a fine of 500 yuan ($75) for beating up the worker, surnamed Liu. The worker sustained minor injuries, the statement said.

The violence drew people’s attention after a Weibo user, Chapai017, posted photos on Wednesday showing Liu with blood on her face and crying.

The accompanying post said the street worker was confronted by Ge and another woman because of a garbage truck that was blocking the driveway. It said Ge was observed assaulting Liu after she scrambled to her feet from a pile of rubbish, as if she had just been knocked down. The other woman shouted, “Do you know how much I earn and how much you earn?” and “You are wasting my time,” the post said.

Residents, who had begun to gather because of the noise, stopped the fight and called the police as Ge and the woman tried to leave, the post said.

The Weibo user, who claimed to have gone to the police station to make a statement, added that Ge was a newly employed professor at Shaanxi University of Science and Technology and had just completed his studies in the United States and Japan. The post said the shouting woman worked in the university’s personnel division, but this was later contradicted by the university, which said she was one of Ge’s relatives.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the university said Ge had been suspended and a work team had been appointed to assist the police with their investigation. The university said it would handle the case “seriously” and in line with the investigation results.

A Weibo post by the university on Thursday confirmed that the woman was not a member of the school’s faculty. It also said Ge had realized the severity of his actions, that he had apologized to the street worker and her family in person and would pay her medical costs.

Ge’s attack on the worker caused an uproar online. Chapai017’s post alone received some 107,000 reposts and 55,000 comments.

One Weibo user commented that “one’s moral standing, as well as academic performance, should factor in the assessment of a college professor”.

Another wrote that the assailant should be brought to justice. “I myself come from a family at the grassroots level and I hope my family will be respected by society. And so do other families of the same background,” the comment said.

However, a Weibo user named Pili_Zhang called for calm, saying criticism should not be directed at the university or its faculty:

“It was wrong for Ge to beat the cleaner, but let’s leave the case to the law and the police, and stop the verbal attacks on the university and its faculty.”

With a record-high number of trips made during the past eight days, the National Day holiday, one of the most important times of a year in China, has inspired big changes in the way people travel.

Usually, the National Day holiday runs from Oct 1 to 7 and is dubbed “Golden Week”.

This year, the holiday was prolonged to eight days, as it coincided with Mid-Autumn Festival. The longer duration of the holiday enabled more people to take trips.

Statistics from the China National Tourism Administration showed that 705 million trips were made during the eight-day National Day holiday this year, 663 million of them in the first seven days, up 12 percent from the seven-day holiday last year. Five years ago, 428 million trips were taken during the seven-day holiday.

But the increasing number of trips is not the only change in the past several years.

Rail travel, particularly on high-speed trains, has enabled more people to travel during the holiday. Estimates from China Railway Corp, the national rail operator, showed that about 40 percent of trips during the holiday were made by train, including on the Fuxing, the high-speed train developed by China that was put into operation in June and travels at speeds up to 350 km/h.

At the same time, the free-of-charge policy on expressways during public holidays, which first went into effect during the 2012 National Day holiday, made it cheaper and more convenient for people taking road trips. This encouraged more people to travel by car.

Yang Pei, 46, a resident of Dezhou, Shandong province, took his wife and daughter on a road trip to Tianjin during the holiday. On other days, a road trip between his hometown and the North China municipality would cost travelers 210 yuan ($32) to pass the toll stations on the expressways.

“With the ‘free pass’ policy on holidays, our only cost during this trip is gasoline, which is about 300 yuan,” he said. “It’s very economical because traveling by high-speed train would cost a family of three twice as much.”

In addition, tourists in China also used shared bikes more frequently during the holiday, which added convenience in urban areas and helped the environment.

As of the end of July, more than 16 million bikes will have been put into operation nationwide. According to Ofo, one of the major bike-sharing companies, the usage frequency of its bikes increased by 15 percent during the National Day holiday. Carbon emissions were reduced by about 78,000 metric tons, it said.

Zhang Min, a Beijing resident who traveled to Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province, said shared bikes helped her when she was sightseeing in the city.

“It’s really comfortable to ride a bike and appreciate the scenery in the mild autumn weather, not to mention that I don’t have to call an expensive taxi or wait for the always-crowded bus,” she said, adding that the occurrence of new things has given people more choices in their outing.

Seven people have been detained by police and are under investigation for chasing a herd of Tibetan antelopes, using off-road vehicles, reports thepaper.cn.

The drivers of two off-road vehicles are now under investigation for chasing Tibetan antelopes on October 4, 2017. [Photo: Weibo/Safe Lhasa]

It followed the posting of a short video online showing two vehicles driving close to a herd of Tibetan antelopes, which officials identified as being near Co Ngoin Lake in Tibet Autonomous Region.

An official investigation was immediately launched by local police.

Photos of two white off-road vehicles chasing Tibetan antelopes on October 4, 2017 were posted online two days later. [Photo: Weibo]

Police said the suspects had approached the Tibetan antelopes in the off-road vehicles in order to take photos of them at close range, and did not intend to hit them. No Tibetan antelope was killed or injured as a result of the incident.

The investigation is still underway.

Tibet is home to around 125 species of wild animals of national priority protection, including Tibetan antelope, wild yak and kiang, a type of wild donkey.

The Tibetan antelope is native to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. More than 200,000 individuals remain in the wild, most of which dwell in the Qiangtang National Nature Reserve. They have become endangered due to poaching in recent years.

The Tibetan antelope is listed among the protected species under China’s national legislation.

According to its National Wildlife Protection Law, if anyone, in violation of the provisions of this Law, hunts or catches wildlife without a hunting license or in violation of the prescriptions of the hunting license, his catch and unlawful income shall be confiscated and he shall be fined by the department of wildlife administration and, in addition, his hunting gear may be confiscated and his hunting license revoked.

Passengers queue to take a subway after arriving at Beijing Railway Station in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 7, 2017. As the National Day holiday draws to its end, Beijing greets a large number of passengers back to work and college. (Xinhua/Tao Ye)

Chinese railways have been busy during the National Day holiday, carrying people to tourist attractions or back home for family reunions before returning to work and school.

People in China have made about 105 million trips by railway since the holiday travel rush started on Sept. 28, the China Railway Corporation (CRC) said Saturday.

The National Day holiday has been extended to eight days this year to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Cake Festival, which fell on Oct. 4.

On Friday, about 12.4 million trips were made, up 8.6 percent year on year, making it the seventh day in a row with more than 10 million railway trips, said the company.

Expecting 13.6 million trips to be made on Saturday, the company said it had arranged 911 more trains to ensure smooth travel.

Chinese railways set a new record in daily passenger traffic as more than 15 million trips were made on Oct. 1, or the National Day, the first day of the eight-day holiday.

Railways nationwide will serve around 130 million passengers in the 11 days following Sept. 28, according to an early forecast by the CRC.