Before sentencing Bryan Underwood, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle noted the obstacles he had overcome — including mental health problems — and his ill-conceived plan.

“This is the most half-baked treason I’ve ever heard of,” she said.

The Justice Department says Underwood took photographs of restricted areas at the new U.S. consulate in Guangzhou and planned to use them to help China eavesdrop on U.S. officials. The department said that Underwood had lost nearly $160,000 in the stock market and hoped to make $3 million to $5 million. Underwood wrote a letter expressing his desire to work for the China ministry, but was turned away when he attempted to deliver it.

Last year, he pleaded guilty to attempting to communicate national defense information to a foreign government.

Underwood was arrested in Los Angeles in 2011 after evading initial charges that he had lied to the FBI about why he had taken photographs of the consulate.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: diplomacy, espionage, prison, U.S. relations
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When asked by reporters, a spokesman for Guizhou Intermediate Court said: “Are you asking about Bo Xilai case? This is rumour, we have never received this case.”

The China-run Ta Kung Pao newspaper said on its website that Bo’s trial would start on Monday in the southern city of Guiyang and last three days. It cited “well-informed Beijing sources”, but gave no details.

[…] One of Bo’s lawyers, Li Guifang, declined to comment when reached by telephone. Reporters were unable to reach his second lawyer, Wang Zhaofeng, despite repeated telephone calls.

[…] Li Zhuang, a Beijing lawyer who opposed Wang Lijun and Bo for mounting a sweeping crackdown on foes in the name of fighting organised crime, said he also thought it was possible for a Monday hearing.

“I would only say it’s possible, though not totally certain,” Li said.

Comments about Bo’s likely fate from Li Jingtian, executive vice president of the Central Party School, were similarly inconclusive. From Tom Orlik and Gerard Baker at The Wall Street Journal:

“We have always had severe punishment for corrupt officials,” Mr. Li said during the interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, in response to a question about the fate of Mr. Bo. Such interviews are rare for senior party officials.

He cited the examples of Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan, two leaders in the party’s early days who were executed in the 1950s following accusations of embezzlement and other crimes in one of the party’s first anticorruption campaigns.

[…] Mr. Li’s comments don’t mean Mr. Bo is likely to face execution if found guilty. While he cited the case of another execution—that of Cheng Kejie, a former top legislator who was executed in 2000—he also cited the case of Chen Xitong, a former party chief of Beijing convicted on corruption charges in 1998 but released from prison on medical parole in 2006. He also named Chen Liangyu, the former party secretary of Shanghai who was dismissed in 2006 and later sentenced to 18 years in prison on corruption charges.

See more on the Bo case to date, some of it more certain than the above, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Central Party School, Chen Liangyu, Chen Xitong, corrupt officials, corruption, Davos, death penalty, embezzlement, execution, Guizhou, Li Guifang, Li Zhuang, prison, trials, Wang Lijun, Wang Zhaofeng, World Economic Forum
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On January 12, 2013, two family members of the imprisoned rights defense lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟) were permitted to visit Gao at Shaya Prison in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, according to Gao’s wife Geng He (耿和). This was the first family visit since March 24, 2012, and the only confirmation since that date that Gao is still alive. Gao’s younger brother and Geng He’s father were allowed to see Gao and speak with him by phone through a glass window.

[…] Before being allowed to see Gao, his younger brother was subjected to a body search and told that, during the visit, he was not allowed to discuss Gao’s case, Gao’s prison situation, or Geng He and their two children, who are in the United States, or to accept press interviews after the visit.

Gao’s mind seemed clear and he spoke normally. His younger brother was not able to find out when Gao is scheduled to be released, or whether he received the letters from his wife and children.

When Gao’s brother asked when Gao is permitted to see his family next, he was told that the family has to “follow old ways.” Geng He said, “Last time, it took nine months for the authorities to allow the family to see Gao in prison. How long will it take next time?”

See more on Gao’s case at Human Rights in China and at CDT.

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Post tags: Gao Zhisheng, human rights conditions, prison, prisoners, rights lawyers, torture, Xinjiang
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The book was a long time in the making and has come at huge personal cost. Faced with the threat of more prison if he had it published abroad, he decided to flee China in 2011, leaving his mother and others behind.

“They were watching my emails and they knew I was in touch with editors in Germany and Taiwan,” he said at the launch of For a Song and a Hundred Songs in Paris.

“They said I couldn’t publish the book, and if I did, they would put me in prison again, this time for at least 10 years … The German and Taiwan editors got worried about my safety and they pushed back the publication date.

“All in all, they pushed it back three times. The third time, I decided to escape.”

Liao discussed the book’s origins with Mariana Grépinet (article in French) at Paris Match:

This book almost never saw the light of day. Why is that?

I started writing it upon leaving prison. I’d formed the habit of scribbling poems in very small writing, because they only gave us pencil and paper for a couple of hours each month. The first time, it took a little over a year. I had over 300,000 characters! On April 4th, 1995, the police came and confiscated my manuscript. At that point, I wasn’t using a computer, I wrote it all by hand. So I had a choice: I could forget about it, or rewrite the whole thing. I spent two years rewriting it. That was a formidable memory exercise! And paradoxically, it helped a lot with the literary structure as well as my reports on the dregs of Chinese society: I was able to record everything down to the slightest details …. Then the police came back. I’d written even smaller so I could hide the pages more easily, but they stole it again anyway. The third time, I had a computer, a big one, and took the precaution of making extra copies. Of course, each version was different. Only the police could say which was best: they are my most loyal readers!

[…] You seem bitter ….

In China, the air, the blood, the milk, and even the values are polluted. If the west continues to import from China, it too will end up as one vast dustbin.

Fragments of Liao’s time in prison can be seen in Nineteen Days, his recollections of June 4ths from 1989 to 2009, translated by Wenguang Huang and published in The Paris Review:

June 4, 1993

I was transferred from the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison in the suburbs of Chongqing. I will serve out the rest of my sentence at the No. 3 Prison in Dazu County, in northern Sichuan Province. Tonight, a dozen convicted counterrevolutionaries gathered spontaneously in the courtyard, squatting down and silently watching the sky like those fabled frogs stuck at the bottom of a deep well.

I was holding a flute in my hand. The crowd surrounded me, asking me to play a tune. I was still an amateur, though, and hadn’t yet mastered the instrument. I became really nervous in front of the crowd and played out a string of dissonant notes.

Li Bifeng, an inmate, patted me on my shoulder and said: “Old Liao, I’m glad that you will be released soon.” Another inmate, Pu Yong, who died soon after his release, interrupted us: “We will all be released soon. I bet you that on the fifth anniversary, the verdict will be overturned and all of us, no matter what type of sentences we are serving, will be released.”

In November, Li was sentenced to 12 years in prison for charges related to a property deal. According to Liao, the case was actually motivated by officials’ misplaced suspicions that Li had financed his escape to Germany.

See also Philip Gourevitch on Liao’s move to Germany at The New Yorker, and an interview with Ian Johnson at The New York Review of Books soon afterwards, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: exiles, France, Germany, June 4th, Liao Yiwu, prison, prisoners, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, writers, writers and literature
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At the start of the Cultural Revolution, the man at the centre of China’s worst political scandal in decades was a student at the Number Four High School in Beijing, an elite cradle for “princelings”, the sons of Communist leaders who had risen to power with Mao.

The school became a crucible for conflicts unleashed with Mao’s call to rebel in the name of his unyielding vision of communism. The era paralyzed the country politically, trigpicturgering social upheaval and economic malaise.

One day in 1967, Bo and two brothers were paraded at the school by an angry group of student “Red Guards”, and accused of resisting the Cultural Revolution just as their father, Vice Premier Bo Yibo, had been toppled along with dozens of Mao’s former comrades and accused of betraying their leader.

Their persecutors twisted their arms behind them and pressed their heads nearly to the ground while pulling back their hair to expose their faces, Duan Ruoshi, a fellow student at the Number Four school, wrote in a memoir published last year.

“Despite the shouts of condemnation from all sides, Bo Yibo’s sons exuded defiance and twisted their bodies in defiance against their oppressors,” Duan wrote in the memoir published by “Remembrance”, an online magazine about the Cultural Revolution.

The ordeal was a lesson for Bo in the capricious currents of Communist Party power, which only a few months before seemed to promise him and other princelings a bright future as inheritors of the Chinese revolution.

The accounts in the report serve as a reminder that Bo has seen his share of turmoil in the past and any jail sentence that might result from the present investigation would not be his first. One retired academic who overheard comments from Bo’s wife’s sister told Buckley that Bo had “been through much worse than this. He’s been through the Cultural Revolution. This is nothing.”

Separately, The Wall Street Journal profiles Chinese Billionaire Xu Ming and details his ties to the Bo family from their time in Dalian, ties which likely led to his detention shortly after Bo’s sacking in March. Xu’s fortunes have risen and fallen along with Bo, a common feature of the grey area between Chinese business and politics:

Many business leaders in China rely on close relationships with party officials, who have sweeping powers to set policy, allocate government contracts, distribute credit from state banks and control the police, media and courts. The business leaders often nurture these relationships with various gifts and favors.

Such relationships rarely are exposed, under a system in which the party forbids public scrutiny of its affairs. Business ties are often hidden through shell companies and offshore vehicles.

The close relationship of a businessman with a political leader “was not anything unique to Bo Xilai,” said Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese politics at Northwestern University. “It happens at every level of government. Find me a Chinese mayor who doesn’t have these special relationships.”

The risk the entrepreneurs run is that when the party does periodically make an example of someone, as it has now with Mr. Bo, the person’s associates and relatives are compromised as well.

See also a report, via CDT, that Bo’s wife has confessed to the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, corruption, Cultural Revolution, dalian, gu kailai, Neil Heywood, persecution, prison, scandal, state capitalism, xu ming
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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.”

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Canada, deportation, Lai Changxin, legal system, prison, smuggling, xiamen
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In a statement released Monday, Gary Locke called on authorities to release Ni Yulan and her husband, Dong Jiqin. Ms. Ni, 52 years old, was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison by a Beijing court on April 10 for fraud and “creating a disturbance.” Her husband was sentenced by the same court to two years in prison, also for creating a disturbance ….

Mr. Locke also expressed concern for the pair’s daughter, Dong Xuan, urging Chinese authorities to “cease any restrictions on the freedoms of [Ms. Ni and Mr. Dong's] family members.”

At a daily briefing on Monday, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin rejected the call. “We hope relevant countries will respect China’s judicial sovereignty,” he said in response to a question about Mr. Locke’s statement.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: forced demolitions, Gary Locke, housing right, Ni Yulan, prison, prison abuse
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If I were a Chinese person and not a foreigner, a crime like mine would have been dealt with on the “city district” level, as opposed to the “municipal” level which is much tougher.

The other people incarcerated at Beijing No. 1 Detention Center were all facing life sentences or death sentences, at least as a possibility, so it’s not a place where detainees are given a lot of slack. It’s the site of Beijing’s newly constructed hi‐tech lethal injection chamber.

It was boring as anything, and the rules were strict.

Thankfully, foreigners are housed in a section where we were mixed with big‐time white collar Chinese criminals, who are a better sort than the murderers and cannibals and rapists housed in other parts of the facility. Many of the Chinese people I was in close contact with were college educated, and many had been in positions of high responsibility. The CFO of Gome was in my cell; Huang Guangyu the CEO – formerly the richest man in China – was down the hall. I often saw him walking in the hallway heading downstairs for investigation.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, detention, foreigners, prison
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On Tuesday, police in northern China shot and killed one escaped inmate and captured three others. The prisoners had staged a dramatic prison escape over the weekend, leading to a massive manhunt to capture them.

The escapees, who killed one police officer and assaulted others during their escape Saturday were apprehended by police Tuesday morning in Helin county, near the Inner Mongolia regional capital of Hohot, the official Xinhua news agency said in a brief report, adding that one police officer was injured during the operation.

China launched an enormous manhunt, involving more than 6,000 armed police and security officers, in northern China following Saturday’s deadly prison escape by four inmates. The search was ordered by Zhou Yongkang, the country’s top law-and-order official and member of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, underscoring the seriousness of the public and sensational crime.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Inner Mongolia, prison
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The deceased, a 30-year-old man identified as Qi Changjiang, was arrested on July 26th for allegedly selling counterfeit tax receipts around Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech neighborhood. According to Qi’s wife, Zhu Zufen, this was the second time that he had been arrested for selling fake tax receipts. For his previous offense, he had received ten months of forced labor.

Zhu told the newspaper that after her husband’s arrest, she and a lawyer went to the jail, which denied that her husband was in their custody. Zhu said that she was confused, because what the jail said contradicted information given her by the police in Haidian as well as those back in their hometown in Anhui Province.

It was only on September 17 that she received any further word about Qi, in the form of a notification about his death.

Records kept by the medical department of Haidian Jail revealed that Qi had been fasting since August 6. During that time, Qi occasionally took porridge and soybean milk but refused to talk. He was fed through a tube and was given intravenous infusion of fluids.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: crime, hunger strike, prison
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China plans to kick off a nationwide prison administration reform program this year after a five-year trial in 14 provinces, the Ministry of Justice said Wednesday.

The reform, initiated by the ministry in 2003, is aimed at modifying the country’s prison administration method, promoting a community correction system and improving prison facilities, with the emphasis on protecting inmates’ legal rights, said a statement issued by the ministry….[Full Text]

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: legal reform, prison
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Chinese body parts are in hot demand, with Western patients sick of long waiting queues and in need of a transplant.

Customers, including dozens of Australians, are prepared to pay up to $US170,000 ($255,700) for a major organ such as a lung or heart.

Earlier this month PM reported on a Canadian human rights study about political prisoners being executed and then harvested for body parts.

It claimed since 2000 almost 40,000 transplants have been carried out using body parts harvested from executed members of the Falun Gong movement.

Former Beijing policeman Sun Liyong says he knows the methods used by Chinese authorities to harvest body parts from prisoners.

Mr Sun now lives in Australia, but during the 1980s he says he was well aware of what was happening to executed prisoners.[Full Text]

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: death penalty, organ harvesting, prison, Sun Liyong
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China’s top legislators are considering reducing police powers to detain suspects in order to safeguard citizens’ rights…

Under the new draft, the police power to detain suspects for 36 hours and keep them in jail for 30 days, would be cut to a maximum of 12 hours detention and 20 days in jail respectively.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arbitrary detention, human rights conditions, police, police powers, prison
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