Chongqing, Chongqing Municipality, China

• Municipality status
On 14 March 1997, the Eighth National People's Congress decided to merge the city with the neighbouring Fuling, Wanzhou, and Qianjiang prefecture-level districts that it had governed on behalf of the province since September 1996. The resulting single division became Chongqing Municipality, containing 30,020,000 people in forty-three former counties (without intermediate political levels). The municipality became the spearhead of China's effort to develop its western regions and to coordinate the resettlement of residents from the reservoir areas of the Three Gorges Dam project. Its first official ceremony took place on the 18 June 1997. On 8 February 2010, Chongqing became one of the five National Central/Core cities, the other four are Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin. On 18 June 2010, Liangjiang New Area was established in Chongqing, which is one of the 3 National New Areas, the other two being Pudong new area in Shanghai and Binhai new area in Tianjin.
• Organised crime, the gang trials
In the first decade of the 21st century, the city became notorious for organised crime and corruption. Gangsters oversaw businesses involving billions of yuan and the corruption reached into the law-enforcement and justice systems. In 2009, city authorities under the auspices of municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai undertook a large-scale crackdown, arresting 4,893 suspected gangsters, "outlaws" and corrupt cadres, leading to optimism that the period of gangsterism was over. However, local media later highlighted the apparent reliance by the authorities on torture to extract confessions upon which convictions were based. In December 2009, one defence lawyer was controversially arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison for "coaching his client to make false claims of torture" and in July 2010, another lawyer released videotapes of his client describing the torture in detail.