August 31, 2016
BEIJING — An American businesswoman faces trial in China on spying charges dating back 20 years, including that she tried to recruit Chinese in the United States to spy against their homeland, her husband said on Tuesday. He urged President Obama to raise the case with President Xi Jinping of China at a Group of 20 summit meeting in eastern China beginning over the weekend.
The businesswoman, Phan Phan-Gillis, widely known as Sandy, was indicted last month on the espionage charges after having been detained while visiting China last year. But her husband, Jeff Gillis, said he had held off revealing the indictment while new lawyers for his wife tried to come to grips with the case.
Phan Phan-Gillis, an American business consultant from Houston, has been detained in China since March 2015.
Jeff Gillis, via Associated Press
“The time really is critical for Sandy, with the imminent meeting between President Obama and Xi Jinping,” Mr. Gillis said by telephone from the couple’s home in Houston. The prosecutors’ claims against Ms. Phan-Gillis include that she spied while visiting Guangxi, a region of southern China, in 1996, he said.
“Sandy is absolutely innocent,” he said. “Chinese officials did not even check their own internal databases to see if Sandy was in the country then. She wasn’t even in China.”
The indictment also charges that Ms. Phan-Gillis tried to recruit Chinese people in the United States in the late 1990s to work for a “foreign spy organization,” Mr. Gillis said. He said that that allegation was also false and that trying Ms. Phan-Gillis over allegations of events two decades ago in another country defied law and common sense.
Ties between Washington and Beijing have been increasingly strained by such matters as Chinese island-building in the South China Sea, American resentment over investment and business barriers in China, and the Chinese government’s irritation at criticism of its imprisonment of dissidents and rights advocates.
Ms. Phan-Gillis’s case could add to those strains as Mr. Xi meets Mr. Obama in Hangzhou, the site of the two-day summit meeting starting on Sunday. The two presidents are scheduled to hold bilateral talks on Saturday ahead of the main meeting, according to the White House.
“The State Department has aggressively tried to talk to the Chinese about releasing Sandy, including at very high levels,” Mr. Gillis said. State Department officials have told “all levels of the Chinese government” that Ms. Phan-Gillis was not a spy, he said.
American consular officers have visited Ms. Phan-Gillis in detention once a month since March last year, the United States Embassy press office said in response to questions about her case. But the office referred other inquiries to Washington.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to faxed questions about the case.
One of Ms. Phan-Gillis’s two defense lawyers, Shang Baojun, confirmed that he was notified by phone last month of the indictment on a spying charge and had received the indictment document in early August. But Mr. Shang said it would be inappropriate for him to confirm or discuss the specific allegations.
Ms. Phan-Gillis has been held in a detention center in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. She told Mr. Shang during a visit that she had initially admitted to some of the allegations against her, but only because she was intimidated and under intense pressure from investigators, he said.
“She told me that she confessed only under compulsion,” he said. The court in Nanning has not set a date for her trial, but the case is likely to be heard in the next month or two, he said.
Until last year, Ms. Phan-Gillis, 56, was a business consultant who had appeared trusted in China as a liaison between the Houston business community and companies in southern China. She was born in Vietnam to a family of Chinese descent but fled by boat as a teenager, eventually resettling in the United States.
In March last year, she was detained at a border crossing from mainland China into Macau, a special administrative region of the country with its own laws, and held in secret detention, Mr. Gillis said.
In June this year, the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Ms. Phan-Gillis had suffered from arbitrary detention, including deprivation of access to lawyers. And Mr. Gillis said that his wife has told an American consular official who visited her in July that she had been subjected to harsh and unrelenting interrogation.
“They put words in my mouth, saying I must follow them in how I said things,” Ms. Phan-Gillis told the consular officer, according to her husband’s account of what he was told by State Department officials. The pressure appeared to contribute to heart problems suffered by his wife that resulted in two hospital stays, Mr. Gillis said.
She could be sentenced to more than 10 years in prison if convicted, he said. But he said he worried that her fragile health, including hypertension and diabetes, would not hold up.
“Quite frankly, even at the low end of that, I would really fear for my wife,” he said of the possible prison term. “A Chinese prison is not a country club.”
