American fights imprisonment in China courts

RIGHTS VIOLATION BLAMED FOR LONG JAIL SENTENCE

By KARL SCHOENBERGER
MERCURY NEWS
January 17, 2004

SHANGHAI, China - The foreigners' unit at Shanghai's Qingpu Prison began providing inmates with hot water nearly two years ago, but Jude Shao continues to take cold showers. The Stanford MBA holder wants to remind himself of what he has been through, he says, and channel his energy for the struggle to prove his innocence.

Before his arrival at Qingpu in June of 2000, authorities detained the Chinese-American businessman for 26 months in a holding cell jammed with more than a dozen other criminal suspects. Space was so tight there was often no room to turn over during sleepless nights on the hard floor. Shao claims he was held incommunicado before his summary trial, after which he was convicted of tax evasion and fraud and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

In his first jailhouse interview with a news organization, Shao told the Mercury News last month he realizes his own arrogance was part of the reason why he has spent the past 5 1/2 years behind bars. He regretted the contemptuous way he dealt with government tax auditors who examined the books of his Shanghai subsidiary in July 1997 -- a misstep that led to his arrest.

But Shao makes no apologies for his tenacity in taking on China's criminal justice bureaucracy. Shao is one of more than 50 American citizens serving time in Chinese jails, but his case stands out because of serious violations of his legal rights during his pretrial detention. His story serves as a warning of the legal land mines awaiting small-scale entrepreneurs in China, where enforcement of the law is often arbitrary.

"A lot of Chinese entrepreneurs get into trouble like this if they make a lot of money, but they buy their way out," Shao said, alluding to China's systemic corruption. Shao, 41, claims a tax official offered to stop the audit in exchange for a $60,000 "tax audit bond," which Shao construed as a bribe and refused to pay on principle.

Petition refused

In December, the Shanghai People's High Court rejected Shao's second petition for a review of evidence proving he paid the disputed taxes, which were levied on medical equipment his San Francisco-based China Business Ventures imported into China. But the High Court parted from judicial secrecy with a formal letter acknowledging his appeal and confirming that his case was pending before China's Supreme Court in Beijing.

"That's the first time I've been recognized by the High Court," Shao said in a rambling telephone conversation that prison officials cut off in mid-sentence after 50 minutes.

In his call from jail, Shao said prison conditions had improved noticeably for him in November after a Chinese Justice Department comment circulated in the Western media suggesting that the High Court would be willing to review new evidence in his case. "All of a sudden the attitude of the prison officials has changed," Shao said.

"They're allowing me to make phone calls to my family more frequently. It's as if they . . . feel sympathy with me." Qingpu Prison is relatively benign by Chinese standards. Its foreign inmate unit does not fit the dark, foreboding image of the Laogai, China's equivalent of the Soviet Gulag, where political prisoners and hardened criminals alike are punished with forced labor. According to Garry Ohmert, Shao's former cellmate, foreign prisoners at Qingpu were regarded as "intellectuals" and were not forced to do manual labor.

Shao, he said, spent much of his time studying Chinese law and reading books. "He used to read voraciously late into each night to keep his mind off the day's rut," Ohmert said in a lengthy e-mail interview. Shao turned down prison requests to do translations, but volunteered to fix Qingpu's computers, Ohmert said, exploiting his background as an electrical engineer in exchange for occasional Internet access.

"Jude's most admirable quality is his tenaciousness in the face of the almost impossible task of petitioning the PRC government to re-examine his case," said Ohmert, who spent 11 years in Shanghai jails on a drug possession charge until his release last year, using the initials of the People's Republic of China. "Every day for two years Jude spent at least four hours researching the laws of China, going over the documents that he so wisely had saved in California."

Experts on the Chinese legal system are not optimistic about Shao's prospects for a retrial any time soon. His best bet, they say, is to seek early release from prison on medical grounds -- a strategy used by many high-profile political prisoners. Shao appears to be a possible candidate for medical parole, as he has been complaining of severe headaches, back pain and insomnia in weekly visits to the prison hospital.

Stanford attention

Shao's case garnered widespread attention after his classmates at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where the Shanghai-born Shao earned a master's degree in business administration in 1993, drummed up media coverage of his plight. But it's not clear whether his case has become enough of a political issue for senior Chinese officials to generate an early release.

The Stanford supporters operate a Web site (www.freejudeshao.com) and caught the interest of Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor and China expert, who is advising Shao's family. The group also persuaded several members of Congress to write letters to Chinese officials. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry are among those who have written letters in Shao's support.

Shao's guilt or innocence should not be the major concern, said Daniel Yu, a legal scholar at NYU who teaches law in Shanghai and has worked with Cohen on the Shao case. "There's a prevalence of tax evasion in China, even among some foreign companies," Yu said. "Even so, there's no excuse for incommunicado detention. We've seen this kind of procedure being violated routinely, where the accused are held in secret and they go to trial without having seen a lawyer."

In June, U.S. Ambassador to China Clark Randt mentioned Shao's case in a speech while naming a list of Chinese political prisoners of concern to the U.S. government. But Shao is not on the State Department's "priority list" of Chinese prisoners, according to a reliable source. Inmates on this list are raised in back-channel diplomatic discussions about human rights and democratic reform, putting pressure on the Chinese for clemency.

Shao's family members in Shanghai, meanwhile, have been doing their best to support him since police and prosecutors cut them off from direct contact with Shao during his detention, trial and sentencing -- from April 1998 to June 2000.

New wife divorced him

Shao, who had just been granted U.S. citizenship in 1997, was in contact during that period with U.S. consular officials, but claims he was not allowed to see a lawyer during his relentless pretrial interrogation. To his distraught family, including the young woman he had married shortly before his arrest, Shao vanished for 26 months. His wife soon divorced him.

"Jude is a very honest person, and he was very clever when he was a boy. He had a strong sense of self-confidence, and he became very ambitious," said Shao's older sister, Jingli Shao, 48, an eye doctor who coordinates his legal defense campaign. As a teenager, she raised Shao when their parents and two older brothers were banished to the countryside during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s.

The fraternal bonds run deep, especially after their father died in June 2002 at the age of 72. "If Jude is released I hope he can travel between the U.S. and China," said Jingli Shao. "He's a U.S. citizen, but his home and family are in Shanghai."

Asked about his father in his jailhouse interview, Shao's voice cracked. "That's the background that shaped my attitude about many things," he said.

Shao fought bitterly with prison officials for the privilege to wear plain clothes, not prison garb, when he made a deathbed visit -- in irons -- shortly before his father died, said cellmate Ohmert.

The father, a businessman, had been convicted as a "counterrevolutionary" by Red Guards for making critical remarks about the government and was sentenced to three years' hard labor, with his civil rights rescinded for life. On return from exile, he spent a decade fighting in the courts to have his conviction overturned.

"My father had quite a lot of influence on me," Shao said. "I think I inherited some of his righteousness."

Cheated by broker

Charles Duan, a Shanghai lawyer who represented Shao in his lower court trial, said Shao was cheated by an unscrupulous import broker who was a co-defendant in the trial and testified against the American to get a reduced sentence. Duan said he lost the case because the court would not compel customs officials to provide records that would prove Shao's innocence. "We didn't have enough time to prepare for trial," Duan said.

"The details of the case are very complicated, but I think the solution will be something simple," said Shao, moments before the line went dead. "Maybe one day they'll retry this case."

Contact Karl Schoenberger at kschoenberger@mercurynews.com or (415) 477-2500