“I met Chen Guangfu this morning. His health situation is okay,” said Ding Xikui, a lawyer authorised by Chen Kegui’s wife to represent her husband.

“His family are not allowed to leave the village. Chen escaped secretly. He came here to tell us what happened that night [when people broke in] and seeks help from the lawyer. He also supports the request from Chen Kegui’s wife to engage us as his lawyer in this case.”

Chen Kegui’s wife hired Ding and Si Weijiang after two other lawyers she had appointed were intimidated and harassed. But officials told the men that they could not act for Chen Kegui unless his wife came to the police station to file paperwork. She is currently in hiding due to fears for her safety.

Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee met with Chen Guangfu to discuss his son’s case, his own reported torture, his brother’s departure, and other events of the past month.

He said he was restricted from leaving the village and that police in Shandong warned him they would increase the sentence for his son, Chen Kegui, who is being held on an attempted murder charge, if he gave interviews.

“I feel since they are already doing this, why can’t I say something?” Chen Guangfu said late on Wednesday in a teahouse in western Beijing. “I have the power to speak up.”

“I told them their claims have no legal basis, but are based on power or by their will to determine Kegui’s sentence. On this point, I’ll never be able to accept it,” he said, adding he planned to return to his village soon.

Local government and public security bureau officials were not immediately available for comment.

Chen Guangfu said that the security presence around Dongshigu has only intensified since his brother’s escape. As Charles Custer commented at ChinaGeeks in the immediate aftermath of Chen Guangcheng’s escape, this security apparatus had become a significant factor in the local economy, which various parties had a strong interest in sustaining. McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter reported from the area last week on the persistent cordon around the village.

A reporter attempting on Wednesday to walk the stretch of farm fields and groves between [Pengjiazhai] village and Chen’s hometown of Dongshigu was intercepted by two guards at a turn on a small dirt track. Their stools were positioned so that they could easily see anyone crossing to Dongshigu across a remaining flat expanse, the length of about six and a half football fields.

On the highway to Dongshigu, police cars and vans still zipped back and forth, their lights flashing. Men lurked in the meadows.

The continued siege of Dongshigu underscores the punishing weight with which China enforces its version of social order. It suggests, too, the steep costs of such an approach – the inertia of an authoritarian system that becomes difficult to change, and a messy legacy that it must then try to conceal.

See also Chen Guangfu’s earlier account of his torture by local security officers, news of Chen Guangcheng’s arrival in New York and the start of his family’s new life there and more on the Chen Guangcheng saga via CDT.

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Post tags: Beijing, Chen Guangcheng, Dongshigu, house arrest, legal defense, security guards, torture
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The timing and the description of the Heywood case match all the details that have been released of the death, although the detective who called Lee from the Chongqing police did not disclose a name. “I don’t know who was the victim, who was the suspect,” said Lee, who added, “I don’t get involved in politics.”

Lee did not recall the exact date he received the phone call, but thought it was one week before Wang fled to the consulate. The blood sample never arrived in Connecticut.

However, it appears that Wang had had a preliminary test of the sample performed elsewhere. A businessman familiar with the case said that at the consulate, Wang offered the technical evidence from a test of the blood sample.

“The test confirmed the poisoning. There is physical evidence, a sample of flesh. The forensic evidence is very strong,” said the businessman, who asked not to be quoted by name.

The Telegraph’s Jon Swaine writes that the blood samples suggest that investigators may prove decisively that Neil Heywood was poisoned, a revelation that would have serious consequences for Gu Kailai, Bo Xilai or anyone else involved in the incident.

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Post tags: blood sample, Bo Xilai, forensics, gu kailai, murder, Neil Heywood, scandal
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Two men accused of fatally shooting a pair of Chinese graduate students at the University of Southern California were charged on Tuesday with capital murder, making them eligible to face the death penalty if convicted, prosecutors said ….

The men arrested in the case, 20-year-old Bryan Barnes and 19-year-old Javier Bolden, have been charged with capital murder during a suspected robbery. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty or life in prison, both options in a capital case, the district attorney’s office said.

The two will face the charges when they appear in a Los Angeles court later on Tuesday afternoon.

The victims’ parents sued USC last week, accusing the university of making misleading claims about students’ safety. From The Los Angeles Times:

Their attorney, Alan Burton Newman, alleges in the lawsuit that USC inaccurately claimed on its website that it “is ranked among the safest of U.S. universities and colleges, with one of the most comprehensive, proactive campus and community safety programs in the nation.” The suit notes that USC says it provides 24-hour security on campus and in surrounding neighborhoods.

The suit says USC “provided no patrolling” in the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. After the killings, USC persisted with a “clearly misleading” portrayal of safety, reiterating in a letter to the campus community that crime “is low compared to other areas of Los Angeles,” according to the lawsuit.

In response, USC attorney Debra Wong Yang said the university is “deeply saddened by this tragic event, which was a random violent act not representative of the safety of USC or the neighborhoods around campus. While we have deep sympathy for the victims’ families, this lawsuit is baseless and we will move to have it dismissed.”

Stan Abrams, commenting on the case at China Hearsay, agreed, concluding that whatever precautions are taken, “these things just happen.”

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Post tags: death penalty, Los Angeles, murders, USC
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After a serial of trials which first began in April 2009, Wu Ying was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to the Zhejiang Higher People’s Court website.

Legal experts immediately interpreted the sentence as life imprisonment under China’s legal environment.

Wu’s former lawyer Zhang Yanfeng said to media, “She’s been sentenced to life imprisonment, barring any wrongdoing in the next two years.” Zhang said the verdict was expected as provincial high courts are subordinate to the Supreme People’s Court.

New York University law professor Jerome Cohen told The New York Times last month that the SPC’s decision “seems a typical Chinese judicial compromise between what those who call for the death penalty wanted and what Wu’s many supporters, both popular and professional, have called for”. The new suspended death sentence may be an attempt to maintain a similar balance, compared with the lighter sentences Cohen held out as another possible outcome. But human rights researcher Joshua Rosenzweig described it as “a gutless decision, one that ignores core problems with the case“. Although some supporters expressed satisfaction at Wu’s likely escape from execution, questions about uneven punishment and institutional problems remain. From Chuin-Wei Yap at China Real Time Report:

The case attracted widespread media attention for the severity of the sentence and the long-running campaign in China’s blogosphere to save her.

Many of her supporters wondered aloud why she was facing death when corrupt officials found guilty of similar crimes were often granted lighter sentences ….

For the public that’s kept the issue alive for more than three years, it’s a gratifying conclusion. “It’s not just Wu Ying,” Wang Shuo, a prominent magazine editor, wrote on the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo. “If it’s non-violent financial crime, no one should die.”

“Wu Ying was unlucky to run into hole in the legal system,” added another Sina Weibo user writing under the handle Chaoxin Xinzhixing. “When will China’s legal system be more robust, so the public can be convinced?”

Tea Leaf Nation’s survey of Sina Weibo reactions reveals similarly mixed views, and notes that over 3.5 million posts on the subject were culled from search results overnight [Update: TLN reports that many of the culled comments later re-appeared].

Many netizens hailed the result. @杭州恰恰 wrote, “This is…a victory for public opinion! [Responsiveness to] public opinion is progressing!” @洪陈纷纭 wrote: “The power of democracy; the power of Weibo.”

Unfortunately, many netizens felt their victory, if it was theirs at all, was a Pyrrhic one. @Q版温故‘s comment aptly captured netizen sentiment: “No matter what, the result is progress. But this time, the progress is mostly because of the contributions of public opinion, and not law itself.” Instead of law, many commenters perceived realpolitik, hard at work. @闫英士 opined, “The real meaning is this: The death sentence is to save face, the commutation is to quiet citizen rage. But it all has nothing to do with Wu Ying herself, and certainly doesn’t prove the independence of the so-called judiciary.”

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Post tags: death penalty, death sentence, execution, Jerome cohen, Supreme People's Court, Wang Shuo, Wu Ying, Zhejiang
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On March 17, 2012, the Public Security Bureau in Chenzhou, in the central province of Hunan, said it was removing Huang Bailian as head of its drug squad.

Huang’s explanation for the move was simple: “This is retaliation.”

Three years earlier Huang, who is 48 years old and a 25-year veteran of the police force, cracked what he thought was a large drug trafficking case. However, before the case could be handed to prosecutors, his classification of it was changed to clear one suspect. Furthermore, some of the drugs seized during his arrests quickly went missing.

Evidence of the theft pointed to a subordinate of Huang’s, Wang Bin. Furthermore, there were suspicions that Wang and Huang Bailian’s boss, vice-captain of the drug squad Huang Zhongxiang, were protecting traffickers.

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Post tags: corrupt officials, corruption, drug trafficking, Hunan, Murong Xuecun, police corruption, Wen Jiabao
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The trial will take place in Sichuan province’s capital, Chengdu, home to the US consulate where Wang fled. It remains unknown whether the trial will be open to the press or the public, the sources said. Wang could face the death penalty.

If the trial goes ahead as reported, it will serve as a good indication that the outcome of two other connected cases, those of Bo and of his wife Gu Kailai, a murder suspect in the mysterious death of a British businessman, will also be known shortly.

…

Hong Kong-based China law expert Ong Yew-kim said yesterday that he believed Wang could hardly be sentenced to death “as he neither killed anyone, nor had been caught in possession of weaponry”.

“But I wouldn’t be surprised if he receives eight or 10 years of jail terms,” Ong said.

Another source in Chongqing said earlier that Wang, despite his defection attempt, had been acknowledged to “have made a major contribution” to investigations into the Bo scandal.

As the investigations into Bo Xilai and his wife have snowballed, the web of people associated with the scandal has grown as well. The New York Times’ Ed Wong and Jonathan Ansfield reported today that with the relationship between Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun hanging by a thread just days before Wang turned up at the U.S. consulate, three close and powerful allies of Bo rushed to Chongqing to broker a peace:

The most famous of the three, Xu Ming, 41, listed by Forbes as China’s eighth-richest person in 2005, had flown in on his private jet. He and the others held separate meetings with Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang. The damage was irreparable. The former intelligence agent, Yu Junshi, rushed home and stuffed a bag with 1.2 million renminbi, or nearly $200,000, to take to a bank with Ma Biao, the other businessman, known for his girth. Then all three fled to Australia within days, fearful of the fallout from a possible investigation of Mr. Bo.

Those figures are now being detained as central suspects or witnesses in the Chinese government’s broad investigation into Mr. Bo’s use of power. His fall from the party’s top echelons has opened a window on how some of his closest allies from his years as a rising official in northeast China became entwined in the social and economic fabric of Chongqing, a fast-growing western municipality of 31 million that Mr. Bo governed for four years. The accounts about those allies, which raise questions about Mr. Bo’s relations with tycoons, are based primarily on interviews with six people associated with the circle, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of facing official scrutiny, and a review of financial documents and company Web sites. Together, they reveal the workings of the shadowy court of one of China’s leaders, and of the panic that set in when these ambitious figures realized their world was about to collapse.

“These are powerful men with their own style,” said one person who has met with Mr. Yu. “It was all very strange, very abnormal, the way they acted at that time.”

…

The three men who fled to Australia have been held for two months. They left after Mr. Wang’s consulate visit, but returned to China in about 10 days on Mr. Xu’s private jet, thinking that Mr. Bo had avoided serious trouble. They were picked up by the police around the time that Mr. Bo was removed as party chief of Chongqing on March 15, according to several people who knew the men or their friends and families. One with security contacts said almost 60 people had been detained.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chengdu, Chongqing, legal system, scandal, treason, Wang Lijun
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United Airlines Flight 88 landed at New York/Newark Liberty International Airport to little fanfare after the U.S. State Department prohibited public and media access.

Less than two hours later, Chen, 40, spoke from New York University, where he will participate in a fellowship.

“I am very grateful to the assistance of the American Embassy and the promise of the Chinese government to keep protection of my rights as a citizen in the long term,” Chen said to a mob of reporters and onlookers. “I am very gratified to see the Chinese government has been dealing with the situation with restraint and calm.”

The activist indicated he had been granted partial U.S. citizenship and asked people to “promote fairness and justice in China.”

Passengers, including reporters, on the flight were not permitted to speak with Chen and his family, but a New York Times reporter did have a brief interview with him:

Mr. Chen left Beijing with his wife and two children, and like most events surrounding his case, the departure was shrouded in secrecy until the last minute. Even on the plane, flight attendants took pains to keep other passengers from invading his privacy, drawing a curtain swiftly around the first rows of the plane where he was sitting with his family.

But in a brief conversation on the plane, Mr. Chen said, “I don’t really feel that happy, but rather sentimental.”

“After all the suffering for years, I don’t have those tearful moments anymore,” he said, “but I do feel something inside.” He looked calm, but his hands shook as he talked about leaving a country he has tried to change for years from within.

“I’m very clear what kind of role I’m playing right now. Opportunity and risk exist at the same time,” he said.In Washington, the State Department praised the Chinese government in a statement that reflected its handling of the case from the start: understated and nonconfrontational, despite the emotions and high stakes involved for both countries. “We also express our appreciation for the manner in which we were able to resolve this matter and to support Mr. Chen’s desire to study in the U.S. and pursue his goals,” the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said.

See also a report by Melinda Liu in the Daily Beast. Hexie Farm drew a cartoon depicting Chen’s flight to the U.S. Read much more about Chen Guangcheng via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, dissidents, exiles, nyu
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Yang says he wants to “enhance China’s prestige in the world …. He speaks in a gentle, friendly manner — in the precise English he learned as a student in Great Britain. Here too, outside the studio, he remains the consummate gentleman, never rising into the shrill tones favored by many a government spokesperson.

On his Weibo account on Wednesday, Yang showed a different side [zh]. Josh Chin’s translation at The Wall Street Journal reads:

The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads. People who can’t find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West. We kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera’s Beijing bureau. We should shut up those who demonize China and send them packing.

The post met with criticism and ridicule from many Sina Weibo users. Charles Custer gathered and translated some responses at ChinaGeeks:

Host Yang, you haven’t gone far enough! We should bring back all the officials’ wives and children from overseas to help build the motherland, we must not allow them to be polluted by foreign trash, yes, and also we should close the borders/forbid international travel, so that there is no contact with overseas forces.

Isn’t your daughter studying in the US?

The fact that this CCTV host isn’t writing editorials for the Beijing Daily is truly a waste of talent.

This is exactly how the Boxer Rebellion started…

Even the state-owned English-language tabloid Global Times paired its translation of Yang’s outburst with some dissenting comments:

@天下乐田: Can we stop this way of governing the country? Public policies come in waves of public campaign and (the effect of which does not last long). How far can it get us to demonize every foreign citizen here who does not have legal residence status? After all, the bad is only a few; the majority of the criminals in the country are Chinese. The point is how to work on efficiency and effectiveness in the public service domain.

@平安08: Should the presenter be more analytical he would realize the we now live in a global village. State border allows for two-way traffic. If others treated the Chinese community with such intense belligerence, it wouldn’t be too good for us. To work hard to make our society a better place starts with us!

Many have wondered whether Yang will now struggle to find foreign guests to appear on his show, with some urging an active boycott. Custer and others went further, quickly putting together a bilingual flyer to be distributed on weibo, calling for Yang’s firing. In response, Yang insisted that he stood against xenophobia, and had been referring only to a small minority of “foreign hooligans” [zh]; but that given his reaction, perhaps Custer was one of them, and his background should be investigated by the Public Security Bureau. “What kind of journalist sets police on to critics?” wondered The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts.

As Custer noted at China Geeks, Yang’s post fits a wider trend:

Yang’s comments come at a particularly sensitive time for foreigners, many of whom are concerned about their safety after a British scumbag and a Russian idiot have stirred up a lot of nationalist, anti-foreign sentiment online (all foreigners are the same, so we’re all guilty by association). Probably related is the crackdown on illegal foreigners in Beijing that Yang was commenting on. This crackdown is perfectly fair in theory — every country has immigration laws and the right to enforce them — but the language and imagery that’s being used to promote it is sort of concerning, as is the idea that foreigners will now be required to carry their papers at all times and submit to random checks. Suddenly, Beijing is feeling a bit like Arizona (that’s not a good thing).

Beijing’s campaign against illegal foreign residents has indeed taken what many feel is an alarming tone. Its “cleaning up” rhetoric has been widely embraced, while a group of web companies including Sina and Baidu is encouraging users to report and publicise bad behaviour by foreigners, whether their papers are in order or not. Relatively trivial incidents risk being blown out of proportion: the verbal abuse flung at a female Chinese train passenger by Russian cellist Oleg Vedernikov was certainly obnoxious, but might ordinarily not have dominated the front page of the Beijing Morning Post. The apparent wave of anti-foreign sentiment, and various parties’ vigorous stoking of it, has fed suspicions of ulterior motives. From Global Post:

Some suspect that the policy is intended to whip up xenophobia to cement the Party’s control after an unprecedented series of snafus embarrassed China on the international stage. Years of carefully sculpting Beijing’s image flew out the window when Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal-rights activist, and Wang Lijun, an iron-fisted police chief, each fled to the US embassy for protection from their own government.

And with the Party preparing for its transfer of power this autumn, the crackdown may be intended to serve as a way to unite popular support.

“By deputizing the populists against the foreigners, it’s a way for the authorities to say we’re all in this together — the government and the people — against the illegal aliens,” says Jeremiah Jenne, a PhD candidate at the University of California-Davis, who has lived in Beijing since 2002.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCTV, immigration, immigration law, racism, sina weibo, soft power, television, xenophobia
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“The Chinese government’s determination to attack crime and root out corruption is unwavering, the report said.

Lai can still appeal against the conviction and sentence.

The court concluded that, from 1991, Lai “established companies, strongholds and networks in Hong Kong and Xiamen to form a smuggling clique” that cheated customs inspectors to import cigarettes, cars, oil products, industrial materials and textiles worth a total of some 27.4 billion yuan ($4.3 billion).

Lai bribed 64 officials through gifts of cash, real estate and vehicles worth some 39.1 million yuan, and he evaded taxes totaling 14.0 billion yuan.

Lai’s crimes occurred in the special economic zone of Xiamen in Fujian province in the mid-1990s when Jia, now the Communist Party’s fourth most senior leader, was the province’s party boss.

In The Globe and Mail, Mark MacKinnon traces Lai’s opportunistic rise to the top of China’s black market and writes that today’s ruling marks the end of China’s Great Gatsby:

In a country where few profess to know the details of the Tiananmen Square massacre, nearly everyone knows Mr. Lai’s name. He’s the ultimate antihero, the poor kid from Fujian province who came to symbolize the excesses and corruption that have spoiled China’s economic rise. Tell someone here that you’re Canadian, and you open yourself to questions about why Canada would shelter a man like Mr. Lai for the dozen years he was in Vancouver fighting extradition before he was finally sent back to China 10 months ago.

The story of Lai Changxing resonates here because it is interwoven with that of modern China. He made it rich through his own enterprise, only to become mired in the payoffs and profiteering that so many Chinese detest. He was a rogue and a bootlegger, a Chinese Jay Gatsby, who is believed to have rubbed shoulders with some of the rising stars of Communist Party, which many believe helps explain the passion with which Beijing fought to have him extradited and jailed back on Chinese soil. (The party boss in Fujian at the height of Mr. Lai’s influence was Jia Qinglin, now a member of the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo. The provincial governor was Xi Jinping, the man tipped to be China’s next president.)

See also recent CDT coverage of Lai’s trial and legacy as “China’s Most Wanted Fugitive.”

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Post tags: Canada, deportation, Lai Changxin, legal system, prison, smuggling, xiamen
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“They put me on a chair, bound my feet with iron chains and locked my hands with handcuffs behind my back,” he said. “They pulled my hands upwards forcefully. Then they slapped me in the face.”

“They first asked me if I knew what this was about. I said ‘I don’t know’. So they beat me and slapped my face. Only on one side, not the other. And they trampled my feet with their leather shoes.”

He told them it was him who had helped Mr Chen because he did not want to implicate others involved, but then realised they knew more details.

”I resisted for a really long time,” he said. ”In the end I couldn’t hold out any more.”

The officials also told Chen Guanfu that his son, Chen Kegui, had hacked and wounded officials. Chen Kegui has since been charged with “intentional homicide”, but his lawyer says he was acting in self-defence.

The full isunaffairs interview with Chen Guangfu is on YouTube and has been translated in full by a CNN reporter, Steven Jiang, on his blog:

China Human Rights Defenders has more details about the situation involving Chen’s brother.

Meanwhile, in a phone call to a U.S. Congressional hearing on his situation, Chen defended Chen Guangfu and Chen Kegui. The Washington Post reports:

Chen complained Tuesday that his elder brother and nephew had both been beaten by Chinese authorities since Chen fled house arrest in late April.

Chen said a charge of homicide brought against his nephew was “trumped up” as he was acting in self-defense after being subjected to a three-hour beating that left him bleeding.

“This is a pattern,” Chen said. “This is not the first time it happened against my family.”

Rights activist Bob Fu, who translated Chen’s comments, earlier testified that Chen’s nephew, Chen Kegui, using a kitchen knife, had injured several people who had burst into his home without warrants.

Joshua Rosenzweig explains that “intentional homicide” in this case is similar to “attempted murder” since the victim survived.

Chen and his family are awaiting travel to the U.S. where Chen has been offered a scholarship to New York University Law School. Officials have told them they should receive passports within 15 days. From BBC:

Mr Chen said government officials came to see him on Wednesday and completed passport applications for him, his wife and their two children.

He said the officials told him the passport would take 15 days to issue, without giving a definite date.

“People from the immigration administration department have been here. We had our pictures taken and forms filled out. (They said) within 15 days,” Mr Chen said.

“They didn’t promise when we’ll get the passport. They didn’t say anything like we will definitely get the passport on a certain day, etc. There was nothing like that told to us,” he added.

Read much more about Chen’s current situation via CDT.

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Post tags: activists, Chen Guangcheng, dissidents, torture
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