China's rural residents experienced better safety circumstances with the lower incidence of criminal cases in the countryside, said a senior police officer on Wednesday.

Wu Dongli, an official with the Ministry of Public Security, said at an online interview that the country's vast rural areas have maintained stable safety situation, without giving the figures of crimes this year.

The stability in rural areas, which are home to more than 900 million people, is actually the foundation for the whole country's harmony and stability, Wu said.

However, some new problems, such as gang-related crimes, have surfaced in rural areas. "Gangs are terrorizing some villages by monopolizing the water supply or farm produce sales," Wu said.

"Thefts, especially the stealing of livestock, farming machinery as well as power and communication facilities, are also rampant in the countryside," he said.

In some areas, farmers have been frequently cheated by fake pesticides, fertilizers and seeds, and more scandals involving farmers and rural minors forced into slavery laborers have been dug out, he added.

To address these problems, the ministry has started combing rural areas for lurking chaos and will give a stern crackdown on crimes that damage the rural residents's life or property, he said.

It has ordered local police departments to step up the supervision over rental houses, small hotels and Internet bars in rural areas and tighten the management on explosives, detonators and poisons, which can still be found easily in some rural stores despite their high lethality, he added.

(Xinhua News Agency August 23, 2007)