Guilty by association: China targets relatives of dissident exiled in Canada

By Nathan Vanderklippe

Weidong Xie came to Canada three years from Beijing China where he was a federal judge. His son was violently detained on Dec. 31.

On the last day of 2016, Xie Cangqiong and his new wife slipped into the underground parking lot at their Beijing apartment complex, ready to go out and celebrate his grandfather’s upcoming 100th birthday.
But when they arrived at their car, they noticed something wrong. 

Their tires had been slashed. 

Moments later, men clothed in black surrounded Mr. Xie, who is 27. 

He struggled to break free and howled in pain.
In a shaky video shot by his wife, he is briefly visible, held in the air by a group of men. 

“My husband’s leg is broken,” she says. 

The two had married only a week before, on Christmas Day. 

One of the men turns to her: “We are enforcing the law. You must co-operate with us.”
Moments later, the young man was gone. 

The family was told he was taken nearly 1,300 kilometres south to Hubei province, although they have not been able to locate him at detention facilities there. 

Police say he is suspected of embezzlement.
His family believes his real crime in the eyes of Chinese authorities is being the son of Xie Weidong, 60, a former Supreme People’s Court Justice who moved to Canada in 2014 and has been an outspoken critic of China’s justice system. 

Chinese authorities accuse the elder Mr. Xie of corruption. 

But bringing him back from Toronto would also silence him.
Mr. Xie has refused, saying he will be tortured if he goes.
So authorities have targeted his relatives, a common tactic in China as escalating government attempts to quash dissent test the limits of old methods of asserting control, such as jailing and sometimes torturing those accused of crimes.

The flourishing of international travel has made it far simpler to leave China, while social media allows those outside the country to maintain connections with large numbers of people back home.
Family members still in the country are being locked up instead.
Four months ago, Mr. Xie’s sister was detained. 

Now his son. 

He fears others will follow. 

Already, relatives have been barred from leaving China, including his son’s new wife, who has been told she cannot attend overseas conferences for work.
“They are using the methods which hurt me most,” he said in an interview.
“The whole family has fallen into extreme terror. They don’t dare to even call each other. My son was arrested for no reason, and everyone in the family knows him. Are they going to be arrested next?” he said.
Mr. Xie snorts at the charges against his son, who is accused of embezzling funds from a company the younger man himself controls. 

“He has the right to allocate company assets where he wants,” he said.
But Chinese authorities appear to be employing a tactic that has become common during sweeping recent campaigns against dissidents – campaigns whose reach has, like with Mr. Xie, extended far beyond China’s borders. 

“They’re using these cruel measures to force me to go back for questioning,” Mr. Xie says.
Exacting revenge on families is a Chinese practice that dates to ancient imperial times, a system of “guilt by association” that resulted in the execution of all relatives of a guilty person.
“It’s of course completely illegal,” said Jiang Jue, a scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies criminal procedures in China. 

“There is no legal basis for such tactics.”
For someone pursued by the Chinese state, the arrest of family members can cause feelings of intense personal guilt, amplified when others discover what has happened, and public support turns into public criticism, Dr. Jiang said.
One dissident told her that the detention of a loved one “turned many people against him. They said he was a selfish man, who did not give enough consideration to his family members.”
The prevalence of such tactics in the Chinese justice system illustrates its unreliability and should serve as a warning to the Liberal government in Ottawa, which has agreed to discuss an extradition treaty with China.
In some cases, the punishment for relatives can last for years. 

Liu Xia

Liu Xia has been kept under house arrest since 2010, when her husband, activist and writer Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize. (China has imprisoned Mr. Liu.)
And the pressure can take many forms. 

Canadian Miss World beauty-pageant contestant Anastasia Lin angered China last year by criticizing its treatment of Falun Gong practitioners. 

After she went public, her father, who ran a successful business in China, watched orders dry up. Money has grown tight and he has struggled at home.
“My cousin told me that his wife left him because he can’t even pay his son’s tuition any more – it’s that bad,” Ms. Lin said. 

“My worst fear is that one day [my father] just disappears.”
Reached by telephone, Ms. Lin’s father said “Don’t call me,” and hung up.
Such tactics have also been used against some of the hundreds of human-rights lawyers and activists arrested by authorities in the past year, as Chinese despot Xi Jinping seeks to reassert the primacy of the Communist Party.
“You see the authorities acting more swiftly to prevent family members from leaving to go abroad, or harassing them so they do not speak out for their loved ones,” said Maya Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch. 

Even very young children have been harassed she said, with at least one child prevented from attending kindergarten.
“Harassment against family members is part of an intensified campaign against activists,” she said. 

“People who speak out against the government pay a huge price.”
Mr. Xie worries that his son will be detained for years, as Chinese authorities have done to You Ziqi, a Canadian woman held in Chinese custody for bribing Mr. Xie while he was a Supreme Court judge. (It is because of her confession that Chinese authorities say they want Mr. Xie to come back; she says she was tortured into admitting guilt.)
Detention of his family members “could continue as long as I refuse to go back,” Mr. Xie said. 

“If I return, it’s possible they will get released. But if I do not confess guilt, they will be arrested again.”

China has sought to force him back, issuing an Interpol red notice against him, which acts like an international arrest warrant. 

Mr. Xie has disputed that notice, but his North American lawyers have so far been unsuccessful.
He is also fighting for permanent-resident status in Canada, where the government has said he is criminally inadmissible, a decision that is now under judicial review.
Mr. Xie, meanwhile, is left trying to sort out where his own breaking point lies. 

“My father is 99 now. If they bother my father, should I give in?” he said.
The experience has left him more disillusioned about the way justice is delivered in the system where he once held a senior role, before quitting in disgust.
In China, “the law often becomes a joke,” he said.
But, he added, others have endured even harsher treatment. 

“I am not the worst. There are many more.”

China tortured detained Canadian into giving bribery confession

By CRAIG OFFMAN

A Canadian citizen held in Chinese custody says authorities tortured her into confessing that she bribed a former leading official who became an outspoken critic of the regime.
You Ziqi of Richmond, B.C., was detained on fraud charges by customs officials at the Beijing airport in 2014 while travelling with her son to visit family in Hubei province.
In a complaint written to the Chinese authorities and obtained by The Globe and Mail, Ms. You said Chinese officials forced her to give testimony that she had bribed Xie Weidong, who was a businessman and former Supreme Court judge before he immigrated to Canada two years ago. 

In the meantime, the Chinese government seized almost all of Ms. You’s family assets, worth around $10-million.
Evidence provided by Ms. You became the basis for a Red Notice, an international arrest warrant-like demand issued by Interpol, against Mr. Xie, who lives in Toronto and has applied for permanent residence here.
Both expatriates say the case against them is based on false testimony, instigated by Communist Party officials trying to cover up the theft of Ms. You’s family assets. 

“I have come from inside the system. I know very well the extent of corruption and darkness there,” Mr. Xie told The Globe.
Their plights represent the murk of the country’s judiciary system, which remains firmly controlled by the party. 

What may be look like an earnest effort to root out corruption could equally be part of a broader effort to purge an official who has fallen out of favour. 

Such a dilemma underscores the difficulty of co-operating with a country whose evidence is often unreliable and whose allegations of criminality often masks ulterior motives.
Winnipeg lawyer David Matas, who has a long career in the field of human rights in China, said these kinds of situations are common. 

“The target of a corruption charge is being asked to implicate somebody relatively high up,” he noted. “They operate by attacking friends, relatives, neighbours and business associates as a way of getting the target. They drain the pool to catch the fish.”
At the same time, China is pushing for countries such as Canada and the United States to participate in Operation Foxhunt, its controversial effort to scour the globe for people it calls corrupt. 

Beijing has pushed Ottawa for a formal extradition treaty, and the government has agreed to discussions.
This week, Interpol announced that a leading Chinese security official, Meng Hongwei, will head the global police organization, stoking worry that the appointment may be instrumental in tracking down dissidents as well as alleged fugitives who have fled abroad.
The allegations against Ms. You date back to 1999, when she represented her brother in a debt dispute that landed before Mr. Xie while he was a judge on the Chinese Supreme Court.
Mr. Xie ruled in Ms. You’s favour, and told The Globe that he reached out to her after delivering his verdict. 

At the time, he was planning to step down from the court to launch a website devoted to legal matters.
“She was a businesswoman, and I was just starting my own business. We had a lot in common,” Mr. Xie said.
He left the court in 1999. 

The two became romantically involved, he added, but the relationship did not last.
In 2002, Ms. You left for Canada, where she obtained citizenship. 

While she was gone, authorities targeted her family back home, seizing more than $10-million in assets from her brother, including a set of precious books and a limousine.
When authorities arrested Ms. You upon her return to China in 2014, they showed a remittance slip that, they said, proved her brother’s company had invested in Mr. Xie’s website in 2004 – which they called evidence of a bribe for the favourable Supreme Court ruling years earlier.
As interrogators pushed her to confess, they threatened to go public with a tale of her seducing an important judge, and amassed bank transfer statements, audit reports and testimony that, they said, proved she had on several occasions moved public company funds into accounts she personally controlled.
“The suspect You Ziqi defrauded the wealth of listed companies in large numbers,” legal papers filed against her allege.
Authorities changed her name while in detention and told her they could send her to remote Inner Mongolia, where “even if she died, no one would know,” her lawyer, Xuan Dong, said in an interview. 

He was not allowed to see her until she had been in detention for more than a year. 

By that time, she had signed a confession, but authorities refused to provide Mr. Xuan the videotape of her confession.
Later, Ms. You recanted her testimony, insisting that it was forced in a detailed six-page letter – copied to Xi Jinping – and in court, where in a pretrial meeting she threatened to commit suicide inside the courtroom if found guilty.
According to documents provided by Ms. You’s son, Li Ang, consular officials have visited Ms. You at least three times. 

“Canada takes allegations of mistreatment or torture of Canadian citizens abroad extremely seriously,” Global Affairs spokeswoman Jocelyn Sweet wrote in an e-mail, adding that the department has put in place a mechanism designed to identify situations in which mistreatment of a Canadian may have occurred and to take steps to protect the interests and well-being of Canadians.
Mr. Li, who was with his mother at the Beijing airport when she was detained, said that as she was taken into custody, his mother told him to take of himself, but she didn’t seem troubled. 

“She was confident she was innocent,” he said.
Based on the evidence it extracted from Ms. You, Beijing issued an Interpol Red Notice seeking the arrest of Mr. Xie, who moved to Canada in 2014. 

In a June, 2016, notice provided by Mr. Xie, the Department of Canadian Citizenship and Immigration listed a set of accusations against him based on the Red Notice.
The Immigration Department said it could not comment on a specific case without consent. 

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not respond to questions.
Mr. Xie said one his sisters has now been hauled away in China and accused of taking bribes, as a way to force him back. 

Another sister, who also lives in Canada, has been barred from leaving China.
For China, bringing back Mr. Xie could have another benefit, silencing a rare figure who both occupied the highest levels of the judiciary and emerged as a public critic.
“If the Canadian government establishes an extradition treaty with the Chinese government, the Canadian government will be helping the evil and dark forces of the Chinese government,” he said.