At Slate, Geoffrey Sant describes the practice—”not common, but not rare either”, according to one police officer—of 顶罪 ding zui: hiring a body double to stand trial and serve a criminal sentence in one’s place.
[…] The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”
The ability to hire so-called substitute criminals is just one way in which China’s extreme upper crust are able to live by their own set of rules. While Occupy Wall Street grabbed attention for its attacks on the “1 percent,” in China, a much smaller fraction of the country controls an even greater amount of wealth. The top one-tenth of 1 percent in China controls close to half of the country’s riches. The children and relatives of China’s rulers, many of whom grew up together, form a thicket of mutually beneficial relationships, with many able to enrich themselves financially and, if necessary, gain protection from criminal allegations.
Sant traces the use of ding zui back to the Imperial era, when some officials reportedly defended it on the basis that that justice was still done as long as the “market value” of the punishment was paid.
China Law Prof Blog (via @chinahearsay) has excavated a 2004 story about an entire fake prison in Sichuan province, set up as cover for a factory making pirate cigarettes.
