Chinese Entrepreneur Takes On the System, and Drops Out of Sight

By Chris Buckley

Zhao Faqi, 52, hoped to strike it rich when in 2003 he signed a government contract for coal exploration rights. Then the government tore up the deal. He fought back, and now he has vanished.

YULIN, China — For months, Zhao Faqi was a folk hero for entrepreneurs in China — an investor who fought the government in court and online, and against the odds, seemed poised to win.

He accused officials of stealing his rights to coal-rich land, and ignited a furor by accusing China’s most powerful judge of corruption.
Now, Mr. Zhao has dropped out of sight — and the authorities want to erase his story.
For much of the winter, Mr. Zhao’s case was the subject of avid discussion on Chinese social media, and his supporters saw it as a test of whether the Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, would support the troubled private sector against grasping officials.
Now, as the Communist Party-controlled legislature gathers for its annual meeting in Beijing, it seems the authorities have decided that investors like Mr. Zhao spell trouble.
The state news media has painted him as a cunning schemer. 

A judge who supported his case was paraded on television. 

A crusading former talk show host who helped bring the case to light has fallen silent.
Mr. Zhao’s arc from self-declared victim to officially designated villain has been dramatic even for China, where the party controls the courts and businesspeople can abruptly fall from grace. 

Mr. Zhao’s disappearance is a demonstration of the hazards that entrepreneurs face in taking on powerful Chinese officials.
“I’ve faced a lot of risks and pressure because of this lawsuit,” Mr. Zhao said in an interview in Beijing a few weeks before he disappeared. 

Chinese entrepreneurs, he said, yearned for the rule of law to replace arbitrary power. 

“You can’t say someone is protected one day, and take away protection the next day.”
Mr. Zhao drew support from liberal economists and lawyers who have been unsettled by Xi’s reverence for communist tradition and support for state-owned companies, which he has urged to grow “stronger, better and bigger.”

Xi Jinping had kindled expectations that he would be a friend of the private sector, but his talk of reform has often been drowned out by calls to strengthen government-led industry programs.

The gloom prompted Xi to publicly reassure the private sector at least three times in a month that the leadership remained committed to its success. 

In early November, he also took the rare step of admitting that the government had gone too far.
“It should be acknowledged that the private sector is experiencing difficulties that are real, and even quite severe,” Xi said at a meeting with more than 50 selected businesspeople. 

“Private businesses and businesspeople are one of us.”
Such reassurances may now mean little to Mr. Zhao.
A former soldier, Mr. Zhao went into business after quitting his job for a supplies company in 1991. He made his fortune as a construction contractor and later plowed his earnings into the mining investment.
Mr. Zhao, 52, was among the entrepreneurs who plunged into business after Deng Xiaoping, then China’s paramount leader, unleashed market overhauls. 

At the time, Mr. Zhao said, entrepreneurs were like famished goats set free from a pen and allowed to flourish.
“But we’re seeing this vitality steadily shrink,” he said.
Since 2005, he has been fighting for the right to explore more than 100 square miles of sandy, scrub-covered land on the fringe of Yulin, a coal-rich city in Shaanxi Province. 

After initial surveys indicated that the land was abundant in coal, the mining institute that had sold an 80 percent share of exploration rights to Mr. Zhao’s company canceled the contract, citing government orders.
Mr. Zhao waged a legal fight that took him all the way to China’s top court, the Supreme People’s Court.
His chances of victory seemed slim. 

In China, judges answer to the party. 

While courts have greater autonomy than before in business disputes, they often rule in favor of officials and their allies.

Zhou Qiang, chief justice and president of the Supreme People’s Court of China, bowing to Xi, second from right in the middle row, during a meeting of China’s legislature in Beijing last year.

Still, in late 2017, the Supreme People’s Court ruled that Mr. Zhao’s contract was valid.
But officials made no effort to enforce the ruling.
Then, late last year, something unusual happened.
Cui Yongyuan, a former Chinese television talk show host with a massive internet following, took up Mr. Zhao’s cause, fueling an uproar in the Chinese news media, which was largely sympathetic.
Mr. Cui said that files from the case had vanished from the Supreme People’s Court. 

He also revealed that a disgruntled judge on the court, Wang Linqing, claimed that China’s top judge, Zhou Qiang, tried to ensure that judges did not rule in Mr. Zhao’s favor.
Mr. Cui shared excerpts from interviews with Judge Wang on Sina Weibo, a social media service where he has nearly 20 million followers. 

The judge anxiously described how files from Mr. Zhao’s case had vanished from his office.
“This is something that I never imagined would happen,” Judge Wang said in one of the excerpts.
When the Supreme People’s Court acknowledged a problem and party investigators opened a high-level inquiry, Mr. Zhao was cautiously hopeful.
“It’s progress toward the rule of law,” Mr. Zhao said in an interview at the time. 

“But the outcome is unclear.”
Mr. Zhao was right to be cautious. 

Earlier this month, the government released the findings from the investigation, and they were damning for him and his supporters.

A disused mine entry on the disputed land on the rural fringe of Yulin, a coal-rich city in Shaanxi Province, where Mr. Zhao’s company had exploration rights.

The investigators said that Judge Wang himself had spirited away the missing case files. 

A report aired on official Chinese television showed him confessing that he had nursed grudges against more senior judges and tried to take revenge by stealing the files to create an embarrassing scandal.
“I offer my heartfelt apologies to the many internet users” who followed the case, Judge Wang said. “My behavior amounted to swindling their well-meaning hearts.”
Supporters said that they were worried that Mr. Zhao and Judge Wang’s real offense was rocking the political boat. 

They were especially shocked that Judge Wang was shown on television avowing himself guilty of breaking the law even before a formal investigation by the police, joining the ranks of dissidents and rights lawyers who have been forced to record scripted confessions while in detention.
“The official reports are full of problems, and the biggest one is how Judge Wang Linqing was made to confess on television,” said Sheng Hong, executive director of the Unirule Institute of Economics, a think tank in Beijing that backs market liberalization and previously held a forum about Mr. Zhao’s case.
Since the findings were released, Mr. Zhao’s phone has been turned off, and he appears to have gone into hiding or official custody. 

Judge Wang faces a criminal investigation and a likely prison sentence.
The supreme court, Ministry of Public Security and other government offices did not answer questions about whether Mr. Zhao was detained, and his family could not be reached. 

Zhou Qiang, the top judge whom Mr. Zhao accused of corruption, has attended the legislative meeting in Beijing, apparently unshaken by the accusations.
Still, Chinese lawyers have said online that the findings in the official report defied logic. 

Was it believable, they asked, that Judge Wang turned on his superiors because he did not want to do overtime one night, as the report had claimed? 

It also failed to address in detail Judge Wang’s claims of being repeatedly intimidated by senior judges, critics said online.
“From the viewpoint of common sense, many things about this are just hard to swallow,” said Liu Xiaoyuan, a human rights lawyer. 

“But it’s also shocking to think that a high-level investigation like this would just make all this up.”

The Enemy Within

China’s Communist Party runs this U.S. TV station: CGTN America, which based in Washington and available in 30 million United States households, does Beijing’s bidding.
By Paul Mozur

From China Central Television’s Beijing offices, Xi Jinping addressed CGTN America’s Washington staff via videoconference in 2016. “Good morning, President Xi,” they responded in a rehearsed moment.

It broadcasts forced confessions to American audiences. 

It avoids subjects that displease Beijing. 

It cuts away when wind musses the hair of Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator.
China Global Television Network America, which reaches 30 million households in the United States, is an arm of China’s propaganda machine. 

It is controlled by the Communist Party and serves as part of what Xi has called Beijing’s “publicity front.”
But when the American authorities asked about those ties, CGTN America argued that the Chinese government doesn’t tell it what to broadcast.
That contention, made last month in a filing with the United States Department of Justice, may not get a warm reception in Washington. 

In the wake of Russian influence in the 2016 election, American officials are trying to get a clearer picture of efforts by China to build influence in the United States. 

The claim by CGTN America, an overtly state-owned organization, represents a direct challenge to that effort.
“They have put the Department of Justice into a position of looking utterly ridiculous and toothless if it simply walks away from this type of false claim,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.
“This is right up there with Pravda claiming to be a health magazine,” he added, referring to the onetime official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

“On its face, it doesn’t hold.”
CGTN America, based in Washington, is part of the international arm of China Central Television, Beijing’s main domestic propaganda organ. 

It runs a typical newsroom except when it comes to stories about China, said four current and former employees, who asked for anonymity to protect their careers. 

Some stories, like the 2012 escape from China of the activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng or 2014 protests in Hong Kong calling for freer elections, were covered only briefly days after the news broke, three of them said.
Employees were rebuked when a report mentioned Falun Gong, the religious group that Beijing considers a cult. 

Images of the flag of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims, are banned from broadcasts.
CGTN made the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, at the urging of the Justice Department. 

FARA requires those doing publicity work for foreign-controlled groups to submit government disclosures.
American officials have stepped up their requests that foreign-controlled groups make FARA filings in response to Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

Two years ago RT America, a Russian-backed broadcaster, made a similar filing at the urging of the Justice Department.
Chinese companies and organizations in general have come under greater scrutiny as the trade war has intensified, including the deals they strike to buy up American firms and technology. 

Some American officials contend the companies pose a security risk.
As part of its demands that CGTN America make a filing under FARA, the Justice Department in a December letter to the broadcaster said it put Xi in a positive light and had attempted to influence the American public during the recent trade dispute.
“Reporting China’s policy positions and presenting them in a positive light are primary reasons for CGTN’s existence,” the letter said.

The Justice Department’s Letter to CGTN America
In December, the Justice Department sent a letter to CGTN America, the American arm of state-run China Central Television, outlining the reasons why it should register as a foreign agent. (PDF, 17 pages, 0.92 MB)
17 pages, 0.92 MB
CGTN America did not respond to emailed requests for comment. 

American officials sometimes challenge filings, requiring registrants to disclose more data about their relationships with foreign governments.
Unlike the Russian influence campaign, which is designed to split Americans, the Chinese propaganda effort tends toward the sunny side. 

Recent broadcasts on CGTN America extolled traditional Chinese medicine and China’s economic rise, while its website offers a link to its panda coverage.
China’s influence push may be ham-handed compared with Russia’s, but it is well funded. 

Official Chinese media spend heavily to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that are banned within China. 

China Daily, an English-language, state-controlled newspaper, buys advertising inserts in American newspapers, including The New York Times.
Based in a glassy office building four blocks from the White House, CGTN America employs about 180 journalists — many of them Americans — devoted to covering the United States. 

It broadcasts seven hours of programming a day through cable and satellite providers like AT&T and Comcast. 

Its employees cover a wide variety of topics, from news to features to business, and occasionally win awards for their coverage.

Current and former CGTN employees say CCTV editors in Beijing dictated plans for covering China. 

American employees sometimes pushed back and the Chinese allowed some flexibility when Beijing’s orders didn’t specifically forbid or dictate content. 

But three people interviewed said they had little choice but to air propaganda clips when Beijing said so.

For instance, in November CGTN America was told to broadcast a piece that played down China’s imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur ethnic minority group. 

The Times and others have reported that the mostly Muslim Uighurs are held against their will, often in dismal conditions, and subject to an indoctrination program designed to discourage Islam.
The piece that aired portrayed the camps as successful vocational training and antiterrorism centers and Uighurs as grateful. 

CGTN America employees packaged the clips with context citing international criticism, but the video nonetheless ran, at times without their framing.
Other times there was less recourse. 

CGTN has broadcast the televised confessions of people accused of a wide variety of crimes in China, with those confessions sometimes touted internally as “exclusives” by editors, one former employee said. 

China forces people to make false, televised confessions to serve its own propaganda needs.
CGTN broadcast the confession of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was imprisoned in China in 2013 and accused of illegally obtaining and selling Chinese citizens’ data.
Mr. Humphrey, who has since been released, had been drugged, chained to a chair, locked in a cage and then made to read out a statement written by the police in front of the cameras. 

The anchor who presented the footage, James Chau, is now a goodwill ambassador with the World Health Organization. 

He declined to comment.

Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once jailed in China. His confession, which had been forced, was broadcast by CGTN’s forerunner.

The news organization “collaborates with the security and police organs to extract forced confessions from prisoners under extreme conditions of duress,” Mr. Humphrey said, adding that the confession was packaged to “distort reality, intrude on privacy and fairness, and humiliate me.”
Chinese leaders get different treatment, said three current or former employees. 

During a 2014 visit by Xi Jinping to Greece, a clip that showed him getting off the plane with unruly hair was eradicated from broadcasts, one current employee said.
One CGTN America show, “The Heat,” is occasionally edited if it is too critical of China, two of the people said.
“CGTN wouldn’t exist or have any significant funding if it weren’t for the Chinese government,” said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group in the United States. 

“And of course that comes with editorial strings attached.”
The Chinese government’s power over CGTN was underscored by a 2016 event at state media facilities in Beijing in which Xi said official media and publicity broadly were “crucial for the party’s path.”
A group of CGTN employees in Washington attended via video conference. 

They had been kept after midnight several days in advance to prepare, without being told why, according to two of the people. 

When Xi greeted them, the group waved and, in a rehearsed moment, called out in unison, “Good morning, President Xi.” 

The moment became a source of tension internally, these people said.
“Media analysts say this is very much about cultivating a more robust image for the Chinese leader,” the CGTN America anchor Roee Ruttenberg said in the channel’s coverage of Xi’s appearance, “through all of the different outlets that in theory fall under his control.”

'My hair turned white': report lifts lid on China's forced confessions

Those coerced into confessing are dressed by police, handed a script and given directions on how to deliver lines
The Guardian

 Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions.

China must stop airing forced confessions from human rights activists, a campaign group has said in a report that details how detainees are coerced into delivering scripted remarks.
There have been at least 45 forced televised confessions in China since 2013, according to the report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. 

The group called on the international community to put pressure on the Chinese government to end the practice and recommended imposing sanctions on executives at China’s state broadcaster, including asset freezes and travel bans.
Those coerced into confessing describe being dressed by police and handed a script they are required to memorise, and even being given directions on how to deliver certain lines or cry on cue, the report says. 

One person described enduring seven hours of recording for a television piece that ultimately amounted to several minutes. 

Others reported police ordering retakes of confessions they were unhappy with.
Some occur in jailhouse settings, with the accused wearing an orange prison vest and sometimes seated behind bars, while others are made to look more neutral. 

The confessions are almost always aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law asserting a presumption of innocence.
Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions. 

Five of the 37 people described in the report who have confessed on Chinese television have since publicly retracted their confessions.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 there has been a wholesale crackdown on civil society and dissent, leading to hundreds of arrests targeting human rights activists and the lawyers that defend them. 

The practice of forced confessions was especially prominent during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval during which “counter-revolutionaries” were paraded through the streets and forced to confess to their alleged crimes.
“[The police] threatened that if I did not cooperate with them they would sentence me to jail time, I’d lose my job, my family would leave me and I’d lose my reputation for the rest of my life,” said one person quoted in the report, identified only as Li. 

“I was only 39 years old, my hair turned white with the enormous pressure and torture of it all.”

Peter Dahlin, a former China-based NGO worker from Sweden, was forced to say he had violated Chinese law in a televised confession in 2016. 

He said the purpose, especially when foreigners were involved, was to shape the conversation from the beginning and preempt any international criticism.
“This goes to show this is not done simply by police for murky propaganda purposes but directly by the state as a part of foreign policy,” he said.
Confessions by a range of suspects have been aired on China Central Television, the nation’s official broadcaster, including those by a British corporate investigator, a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher and dozens of Chinese activists who agitated for change.
Gui Minhai, the bookseller, has been paraded in front of media outlets on three separate occasions. He went missing from his apartment in a Thai resort town in late 2015 only to reappear months later in a Chinese jail, confessing to a traffic incident from 2003.
“These ‘confessions’ are about the crushing of dissent wherever it may arise,” David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a conversation on the website China File last year. 

“The supposed crimes are of middling importance relative to the act of submission itself, the knuckling under to authority. In a word, then, this is political bullying.
“As Xi Jinping trumpets the principle of rule of law, these clearly forced admissions telegraph exactly the opposite message.”