{"id":58103,"date":"2016-07-28T19:53:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T19:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=58103 "},"modified":"2016-07-28T19:53:00","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T19:53:00","slug":"58103-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=58103","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Court Sentences American Publisher to Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 July 28, 2016<\/span><\/p>

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HONG KONG \u2014 A Chinese court has sentenced an American citizen to more than five years in prison for selling magazines about Chinese politics, in a case that bears striking similarities to Beijing\u2019s recent, widely denounced detentions of five Hong Kong-based booksellers.<\/span><\/p>

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Like the booksellers, the American, James J. Wang, who was sentenced on Tuesday by a court in the southern city of Shenzhen, published gossipy material about political intrigue in mainland China. Mr. Wang, a naturalized American citizen whose Chinese name is Wang Jianmin, was also based in Hong Kong, and was accused of running an illegal business.<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0\"201672728CHINA-web1-articleInline.jpg<\/p>

A photograph of James J. Wang from his United States passport. He has been detained by the Chinese authorities since his arrest in May 2014 in Shenzhen.<\/span><\/p>

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He and a colleague, Guo Zhongxiao, who was also sentenced to prison on Tuesday, published and edited two magazines in Hong Kong \u2014 Multiple Face and New-Way Monthly \u2014 that featured loosely sourced articles about Chinese political leaders, including President Xi Jinping. Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo have been detained since their arrests in May 2014 in Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, and both pleaded guilty in November to the charges against them.<\/span><\/p>

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In Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city that has its own legal system and civil liberties unknown on the mainland under an arrangement called \u201cone country, two systems,\u201d there is nothing illegal about publishing such material. But the Chinese authorities\u2019 case appeared to center on the fact that some of the magazines were sold in mainland China, and that Mr. Wang had been in China at the time of his arrest, giving them jurisdiction.<\/span><\/p>

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A spokesman at the United States Embassy in Beijing did not comment on Mr. Wang\u2019s sentencing, referring questions to the State Department\u2019s Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington. The bureau did not respond to an email and telephone message sent during regular working hours on Tuesday.<\/span><\/p>

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Mr. Wang\u2019s access to United States consular officials during his incarceration may have been hampered by the nature of his entry into China. His lawyer, Chen Nansha, said he had entered mainland China from Hong Kong using locally issued travel documents, not his American passport.<\/span><\/p>

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Americans who do not use their passports to enter China generally cannot obtain consular protection there, according to the website of the United States State Department.<\/span><\/p>

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Mr. Wang, whose American passport indicates that he is 62, was sentenced to five years and three months in prison for \u201cillegal business operations,\u201d as well as related charges of bribery and bid-rigging, and was fined about $30,000, according to an announcement by the court in Shenzhen. Mr. Guo was sentenced to two years and three months and fined about $7,500. Mr. Wang was the magazines\u2019 publisher, and Mr. Guo was their editor in chief.<\/span><\/p>

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Mr. Chen, the lawyer, said he had argued in court that Mr. Wang\u2019s sentence was excessive according to Chinese law, given that relatively few of the magazines had been shipped to the mainland and sold there. Court documents show that the two magazines had combined gross sales of about $1 million from September 2012 through April 2014.<\/span><\/p>

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Of that amount, less than $10,000 could be attributed to sales in China, a sum that under Chinese law should not lead to prosecution, Mr. Chen said by telephone from Shenzhen. But officials used the Hong Kong sales figures to determine the sentence, he said.<\/span><\/p>

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\u201c<\/span>His magazines were published in Hong Kong, and most were sold in Hong Kong, and based on \u2018one country, two systems,\u2019 Hong Kong should be considered outside the Chinese mainland,\u201d Mr. Chen said.<\/span><\/p>

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Mr. Chen also said that the charge of bribery was unfounded, saying that it stemmed from the payment of a modest salary to a magazine employee. The bid-rigging charge involved winning a contract to write a market research report for a state-owned oil company.<\/span><\/p>

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Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch who is not related to Mr. Wang, urged the United States to speak out about his case, saying that the nature of his entry into China should not prevent Washington from doing so.<\/span><\/p>

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Silence on the issue, she said, would only embolden Beijing to take more such actions against ethnic Chinese people who hold foreign passports. China has an expansive definition of who it considers citizens, often encompassing people like Mr. Wang, who was born in China.<\/span><\/p>

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\u201c<\/span>The American government, or any government, really shouldn\u2019t buy into this narrative,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>

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China<\/span>\u2019s detention of the Hong Kong booksellers, which drew international attention and contributed to fears that the city\u2019s freedoms are eroding, also involved foreign passport holders. One of the five booksellers, Lee Bo, who disappeared from the streets of Hong Kong in December before surfacing in Chinese custody, is a British citizen, and another, Gui Minhai, who vanished from Thailand, is Swedish.<\/span><\/p>

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There are signs that the Chinese authorities have taken a strong interest in the case of Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo. One is the number of other people who have been convicted in the case, including Mr. Wang\u2019s wife, Xu Zhongyun, and an editor, Liu Haitao, both of whom received prison sentences on Tuesday but are free on probation. Another employee, Luo Sha, was tried separately in November in connection with the bribery and bid-rigging charges.<\/span><\/p>

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Another possible sign of official interest in the case is the frequency with which defense lawyers have been replaced. Mr. Chen is at least the fourth lawyer to represent Mr. Wang since his arrest. His original lawyer, Chen Youxi, was removed from the case by Chinese officials, said a subsequent defense lawyer, Zhou Kui. Li Fangping, another lawyer, said by telephone that he, too, had been taken off the case after Shenzhen prosecutors asked for his removal.<\/span><\/p>

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Colleagues of Mr. Wang say they suspect that one or more of the articles he published about Mr. Xi and other top leaders \u2014 at his two magazines and during an earlier tenure at Yazhou Zhoukan, another Hong Kong\u2013based publication focused on Chinese politics <\/span>\u2014<\/span> had prompted the apparent official interest in his case.<\/span><\/p>

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There appears to be considerable precedent for that. Like Mr. Wang, the five Hong Kong booksellers had published gossipy material about top leaders including Mr. Xi, as well as his wife. Another book publisher, Yiu Mantin, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2014, for smuggling industrial chemicals, just as he was preparing to publish a book highly critical of Mr. Xi.<\/span><\/p>

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Intriguingly, Mr. Wang had published several articles about a notorious criminal, Lai Changxing, who ran a multibillion-dollar smuggling ring in Fujian Province, in southeastern China, with considerable official collusion during a time when Mr. Xi served there as a top official.<\/span><\/p>

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\u201c<\/span>We are all just speculating about what articles it could have been,\u201d said Ji Shuoming, a former colleague of Mr. Wang\u2019s at Yazhou Zhoukan, referring to the possible reasons for his prosecution.<\/span><\/p>

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\u201c<\/span>We are not sure about which article, but can only guess that it involved high-level officials in Beijing,\u201d said Mr. Ji, who described Mr. Wang as a \u201cvery idealistic person.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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Mr. Guo and Mr. Wang will receive credit for the time they have already been detained.<\/span><\/p>

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For detail please visit here<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>Like the booksellers, the American, James J. Wang, who was sentenced on Tuesday by a court in the southern city of Shenzhen, published gossipy material about political intrigue in mainland China. Mr. Wang, a naturalized American citizen whose Chinese name is Wang Jianmin, was also based in Hong Kong, and was accused of running an illegal business.<\/div><div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}