Rogue President

China Just Bribed Trump to Undermine National Security
By Paul Krugman

Trump announced this week that he was working with XiJinping to help save ZTE.

Did the president of the United States just betray the nation’s security in return for a bribe from the Chinese government?
Don’t say that this suggestion is ridiculous: Given everything we know about Donald Trump, it’s well within the bounds of possibility, even plausibility.
Don’t say there’s no proof: We’re not talking about a court of law, where the accused are presumed innocent until proved guilty. 

Where the behavior of high officials is concerned, the standard is very nearly the opposite: They’re supposed to avoid situations in which there is even a hint that their actions might be motivated by personal gain.
Oh, and don’t say that it doesn’t matter one way or the other, because the Republicans who control Congress won’t do anything about it. 

That in itself is a key part of the story: An entire political party — a party that has historically wrapped itself in the flag and questioned the patriotism of its opponents — has become entirely complaisant in the possibility of raw corruption, even if it involves payoffs from hostile foreign powers.
The story so far: In the past few years ZTE, a Chinese electronics company that, among other things, makes cheap smartphones, has gotten into repeated trouble with the U.S. government. 

Many of its products contain U.S. technology — technology that, by law, must not be exported to embargoed nations, including North Korea and Iran. 

But ZTE was circumventing the ban.
Initially, the company was fined $1.2 billion. 

Then, when it became clear that the company had rewarded rather than punished the executives involved, the Commerce Department forbade U.S. technology companies from selling components to ZTE for the next seven years.
And two weeks ago the Pentagon banned sales of ZTE phones on military bases, following warnings from intelligence agencies that the Chinese government may be using the company’s products to conduct espionage.
All of which made it very strange indeed to see Trump suddenly declare that he was working with Xi Jinping of China to help save ZTE — “Too many jobs in China lost” — and that he was ordering the Commerce Department to make it happen.
It’s possible that Trump was just trying to offer an olive branch amid what looks like a possible trade war. 

But why choose such a flagrant example of Chinese misbehavior? 

Which was why many eyes turned to Indonesia, where a Chinese state-owned company just announced a big investmentin a project in which the Trump Organization has a substantial stake.
That investment, by the way, is part of the Belt and Road project, a multinational infrastructure initiative China is using to reinforce its economic centrality — and geopolitical influence — across Eurasia. 

Meanwhile, whatever happened to that Trump infrastructure plan?
Back to ZTE: Was there a quid pro quo? 

We may never know. 

But this wasn’t the first time the Trump administration made a peculiar foreign policy move that seems associated with Trump family business interests.

Last year the administration, bizarrely, backed a Saudi blockade of Qatar, a Middle Eastern nation that also happens to be the site of a major U.S. military base. 

Why? 

Well, the move came shortly after the Qataris refused to invest $500 million in 666 Fifth Avenue, a troubled property owned by the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

Qatar may be about to make a deal on 666 Fifth Avenue, a troubled property owned by the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

And now it looks as if Qatar may be about to make a deal on 666 Fifth Avenue after all. 

I wonder why?
Step back from the details and consider the general picture. 

High officials have the power to reward or punish both businesses and other governments, so that undue influence is always a problem, even if it takes the form of campaign contributions or indirect financial rewards via the revolving door.
But the problem becomes vastly worse if interested parties can simply funnel money to officials through their business holdings — and Trump and his family, by failing to divest from their international business dealings, have basically hung a sign out declaring themselves open to bribery (and also set the standard for the rest of the administration).
And the problem of undue influence is especially severe when it comes to authoritarian foreign governments. 

Democracies have ethical rules of their own: Justin Trudeau would be in big trouble if Canada were caught funneling money to the Trump Organization. 

Corporations can be shamed or sued. 

But if Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin make payoffs to U.S. politicians, who’s going to stop them?
The main answer is supposed to be congressional oversight, which used to mean something. 

If there had been even a whiff of foreign payoffs to, say, Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, there would have been bipartisan demands for an investigation — and a high likelihood of impeachment.
But today’s Republicans have made it clear that they won’t hold Trump accountable for anything, even if it borders on treason.
All of which is to say that Trump’s corruption is only a symptom of a bigger problem: a G.O.P. that will do anything, even betray the nation, in its pursuit of partisan advantage.

Chinese-Australian billionaire involved in UN bribery case

Chau Chak Wing has links with Chinese Communist party and conspired to bribe former UN president John Ashe
By Amy Remeikis and Katharine Murphy

Chau Chak Wing at the opening of the Chau Chak Wing building at the University of Technology, Sydney. 

The chair of Australia’s intelligence and security committee has taken the extraordinary step of using parliamentary privilege to identify one of Australia’s biggest political donors of conspiring to bribe one of the United Nation’s top diplomats.
Andrew Hastie used a speech in the parliament’s Federation Chamber to identify Chinese-Australian billionaire Chau Chak Wing, as “co-conspirator 3” in a 2015 American bribery case, which alleged John Ashe, the former president of the United Nations General Assembly, had been paid to assist in the smooth progress of business deals.
Hastie said he confirmed Chau’s identity while leading a delegation to the United States to discuss Australia’s foreign interference and espinage laws, as the chair of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee and believed it his “duty” to share what he had learnt.
“During discussions with United States authorities I confirmed the long suspected identity of CC3,” he said.
“It is now my duty to inform the house and the Australian people [that person] is Chau Chak Wing. The same man who co-conspired to bribe the UN president of the general assembly, John Ashe. The same man with extensive contacts in the Chinese Communist Party, including the United Front.
“I share it with the House because I believe it to be in the national interest. My duty first and foremost is to the Australian people and the preservation to the ideals of the democratic traditions of our Commonwealth.”
Hastie’s explosive statements in the Federation Chamber comes at a time when the Turnbull government has been attempting to calm diplomatic tensions between Canberra and Beijing prompted by the Coalition’s foreign interference laws.
With relations between Canberra and Beijing tense, the trade minister Steve Ciobo has travelled to China, and the foreign minister Julie Bishop held a lengthy meeting with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Argentina.
Bishop characterised the bilateral discussion with Yi as “very warm and candid and constructive” and said she would shortly visit the Chinese capital.
Her Chinese counterpart was cooler. 

In a translated press statement after the G20 talks, the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi acknowledged China-Australia relations had “encountered some difficulties”.
He also urged Australia to adopt a more positive disposition towards Beijing. 

“If Australia sincerely hopes that the relations between the two countries will return to the right track... they must break away from traditional thinking, take off their coloured glasses, and look at China’s development from a positive angle,” Wang said.

Andrew Hastie in parliament on Tuesday. 

Hastie, a Western Australian conservative, told the chamber on Tuesday night he was naming Chau to ensure Australia’s democracy – and free press – could operate without interference.
“CC3 is a Chinese-Australian citizen. He has also been a very significant donor to both of our major political parties,” he said.
“He has given more than $4m since 2004. He has also donated $45m to universities in Australia. The Australian press has reported these matters and others and have been sued for defamation by CC3.
“CC3 disputes a number of the reported allegations.
“The merits of these defamation cases are appropriately left for a court. 

“My concern is defamation cases can have a chilling effect on our free press.
“Any attempt to silence our media from our telling the truth, provided it is the truth, through a defamation claim can not stand.
“Our democracy only works if we have a free press which can publish information which serves the public interest.
“We don’t always like what the press writes, but they are essential to a free and flourishing democracy. The Australian people deserve the truth.”

Corrupted Clown President

HOW CHINA IS BRIBING DONALD TRUMP
Trump suddenly softens on a Chinese business after Beijing bankrolls a Trump Organization project.
BY BESS LEVIN

When Donald Trump announced on Sunday night that he was riding to the rescue of Chinese electronics maker ZTE, more than a few people, including those who work for him, were shocked. For one thing, Trump has long-claimed that China “is raping us” through unfair trade practices, and stealing American jobs. 

For another, the U.S. and Beijing are currently locked in tense negotiations to avoid a protracted trade war, thanks to the president’s decision to slap Chinese imports with a vast array of tariffs. 

For yet another, just a month prior, Trump’s own Commerce Department had banned shipments of American technology to ZTE for seven years, saying that the company violated American sanctions against countries including Iran and North Korea and lied about punishing employees for doing so. As a result, ZTE halted major operating activities—an outcome you’d have expected to please the president, considering he’d just imposed aluminum and steel tariffs on “national security” grounds, and ZTE was threatening national security. 

So it was a bit odd to see Trump pull a complete 180, suddenly insisting that the company and its 75,000 Chinese jobs must be saved, though to be fair, tweeting “Look, China just pumped $500 million into a Trump Organization project so I had to do them a solid” might not have gone over so well.
Oh, that’s right—according to multiple news outlets, the president’s total about-face on China came just 72 hours after the developer of a theme park outside Jakarta, known as MNC Lido City, with whom the Trump Organization has an agreement to license its name, signed a deal to receive $500 million in Chinese government loans, in addition to another $500 million from government banks. According to Agence France-Presse, the Trump Organization will rake in almost $3.7 million in licensing and consulting payments from Lido, along with another project in Bali. 

The company will also earn management fees, and be “eligible for additional unspecified incentives.” (Upon entering the White House, Trump turned over day-to-day management of the family business to his sons Donny Jr. and Eric, but chose not to divest himself financially from the company.)
Of course, we can’t entirely be sure that the financial injection was the reason for Trump’s sudden soft spot for Chinese jobs. 

Other theories for the change of heart include the fact that the economic nationalists in the White House are losing ground to the free-traders like Larry Kudlow; and that Trump sees helping ZTE as a way to get a trade deal with China. (According to the Washington Post the Chinese government gave and the U.S. a list of economic and trade demands and bullet point 5 was “announce adjustment to the [ZTE] export ban.”) 

But we also know that this is a president for whom kissing the ring goes very, very far. 

“You do a good deal for him, he does a good deal for you. Quid pro quo,” Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, told HuffPost. 

“This is another violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution,” Painter added, referring to the prohibition against the president receiving payments from foreign governments.
The White House, naturally, isn’t commenting on any of this. 

“You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings that may have to do with a foreign government. It’s not something I can speak to,” Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Monday when he was asked about the Lido City deal. 

Luckily for Trump, the Trump Organization can’t speak to questions involving the president, either. And so any ethics issues involving either Trump or the businesses putting money in his pocket necessarily disappear into a metaphysical black hole.
Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, called the turn of events “stunning.” 

“They perpetually find new things to surprise me,” he said. 

“The idea of the president intervening in a law-enforcement matter to satisfy a foreign government is extraordinary. And it’s extraordinary because it doesn’t happen. Opening that door threatens the integrity of all corporate law enforcement. The Chinese government seems to have figured out a way to manipulate Trump,” Weissman added. 

“It’s exactly why this anti-bribery clause of the Constitution is common sense.” 

As Christopher Balding, an economics professor at Shenzhen’s HSBC Business School, told A.F.P., “Even if this deal is completely and entirely above board, it simply furthers the perception of impropriety” concerning Trump’s business dealings. 

“Especially with the potential trade war, this is not a good look... Critics will be entirely right to demand answers.” 

We’re sure the administration, whose motto is basically “We’re open for business, baby,” will get right on that.

U.S. Bribery Case Sheds Light on Mysterious Chinese Company

By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

President Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic, right, and Ye Jianming, left, in Shanghai in September 2015 for the signing of agreements between companies from his country and the Chinese conglomerate CEFC.

Patrick Ho flew to New York in fall 2014. 

His intention, according to the Justice Department, was to bribe African officials on behalf of a private Chinese conglomerate with global ambitions and enormous wealth.
In meetings at the United Nations, Ho, a former Hong Kong civil servant, laid the groundwork for millions of dollars of payments to the President Idriss Déby of Chad and Uganda’s foreign minister in exchange for oil rights in the two countries, federal prosecutors say.
The accusations against Ho, detailed in a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan, became public this week after officials charged him and Cheikh Gadio, a former Senegalese official who acted as a fixer for Ho, with international money laundering and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Gadio was arrested on Friday and Ho on Saturday, the Justice Department said.
The complaint does not name the Chinese company Ho represented, but the specifics of the case make clear the company’s identity: CEFC China Energy Company.
Details outlined by the Justice Department reveal the innovative tactics the company pursued to secure coveted oil rights in Chad and Uganda through its nonprofit think tank in Hong Kong. 

Mr. Ho was an executive at the nonprofit.
CEFC has risen suddenly from a little known Chinese company to a major player in the global energy business, with investments in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. 

In September, the Chinese conglomerate took a $9 billion stake in Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned energy giant and a subject of sanctions by the United States.
CEFC has played to China’s geopolitical ambitions. 

It is among a small number Chinese companies to receive Beijing’s approval to chase splashy deals at a time when the government has mostly restricted overseas acquisitions. 

The investments have largely meshed with China’s strategy to court other countries through infrastructure and energy investment.
Chinese businesses like CEFC are increasingly mixing money with diplomacy as they scour the world to secure valuable natural resources. 

The criminal complaint against Ho shows how the practice can be distorted, offering rare insight into a vast, mysterious conglomerate with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
CEFC provides all of the financing for the China Energy Fund Committee, a Hong Kong research organization. 

The conglomerate’s founder, Ye Jianming, is listed as a chairman on the think tank’s website.
Through Ho, the think tank brokered the approaches to officials in Chad and Uganda, prosecutors say. Details included in the complaint about the company and think tank were confirmed by news releases from the CEFC’s website.
In a statement, CEFC disputed the allegations. 

It said it was “highly concerned” about the action taken against Ho, a former home affairs secretary in Hong Kong, and added that the think tank did not “get involved in business activities of CEFC.”
CEFC has emerged from obscurity in recent years as a major player in the China’s plans for a modern day Silk Road, scooping up businesses in the oil, travel and financial industries in the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Spain and the Middle East. 

Along the way, it has grown into a behemoth with revenue of nearly $40 billion in 2015, according to corporate disclosures.
Ye, who was 25 when he started the company, has been both a corporate leader and a diplomatic envoy of sorts, posing for photographs with leaders like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, and President Idriss Déby of Chad. 

He has also met with Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman.
His think tank holds special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. 

According to its website, it has organized conferences “on world civilizations to explore common ethics” that have featured senior American military officials and Chinese People’s Liberation Army generals.

Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, a former Senegalese official was charged by the Justice Department in bribery scheme along with Patrick Ho, a former Hong Kong civil servant with ties to CEFC.

In China, CEFC has become a prominent corporate player. 

Its oil storage facilities in Hainan Province are leased to the state-owned giant ChemChina as part of the country’s strategic reserves. 

The company also has joint ventures with the state-backed China State Shipbuilding, China Railway and Guangdong Material Reserve Administration. 

The Communist Youth League, which has long bred new generations of party leaders, is listed as a part of the CEFC management that oversees strategy.
CEFC has sought major oil deals outside China, playing a major role in Xi Jinping’s One Belt One Road initiative to bring developing countries on China’s periphery closer to its orbit through infrastructure projects.
In September, CEFC agreed to take the stake in Rosneft. 

In October, Chan Chauto, the company’s president, met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at an investment forum in Moscow.
CEFC also has a joint venture with Kazakhstan’s national oil company, KazMunayGas International, which has given it access to a network of oil and gas terminals in Europe.
It was the company’s pursuit of oil rights in Africa that attracted the Justice Department’s attention.
Ho met Gadio, a former foreign minister in Senegal, at the United Nations with a proposition, according to the complaint filed in Manhattan. 

CEFC wanted to expand its oil operations into Chad, and to do so with CNPC, a state-owned Chinese company facing a $1.2 billion fine in Chad for environmental violations.
Gadio, who helped broker a peace agreement that ended the military conflict between Chad and Sudan, helped facilitate a CEFC pledge in early 2015 that it would make a $2 million “donation” to Idriss Déby for charitable causes, according to emails and documents obtained by the Justice Department.
The pledge was intended to influence the government to give CEFC the exclusive rights to certain oil blocks, federal prosecutors say. 

In the end, the company acquired other oil rights from a Taiwanese company. 

But Chad’s fine against CNPC was ultimately lowered to $400 million, and CEFC is in talks to develop an oil project in the country with CNPC, according to the CEFC website. 

Ho is accused of paying Gadio $400,000 for his services.
In a statement, CEFC said its deal with the Taiwanese company was a “financial investment in Chad” that did not involve any other “interest” from the country’s government.
Edward Y. Kim, Ho’s lawyer, declined to comment. 

Robert Baum, a lawyer for Gadio, said that his client’s “integrity and honesty have never been questioned.”

Around the time that Ho met with Gadio, he also initiated contact with Uganda’s foreign minister, Sam Kutesa, according to the complaint. 

Kutesa had just become president of the United Nations General Assembly, according to the Justice Department. 

Over the course of a year, the two struck up a friendship, the complaint says.
By 2015, Kutesa, in his General Assembly role, had appointed Ye as a “special honorary adviser,” officials said.
When Kutesa returned to his position as Uganda’s foreign minister, he solicited a payment from Ho in the form of a donation for a charitable foundation that he planned to launch, according to the Justice Department. 

Uganda’s foreign minister Sam Kutesa

The payment was actually in exchange for oil contracts.

Ho wired $500,000 into a bank account designated by Kutesa, who is not charged in the criminal complaint.
The Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment. 

CEFC said it had no investment in Uganda.
Two weeks after the complaint says the money was wired, Kutesa’s wife sent a note to Ho, expressing the couple’s thanks to Ye of CEFC.
“Let me seize this opportunity,” she wrote, “to convey our gratitude to the chairman for his contribution to our foundation.”

J.P. Morgan Settlement Lays Bare the Practice of Hiring ‘Princelings’

"Sons and Daughters program" in China sought to hire well-connected offspring to win business
By ARUNA VISWANATHA

A pedestrian walks past the Shanghai office of J.P. Morgan Chase in China. 

A decade ago, a J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. managing director in Asia sent an email to the investment-banking team: “As you know, the firm does not condone the hiring of the children or other relatives of clients or potential clients...In fact, the firm’s policies expressly forbid this,” the director wrote.
Within two years, however, the team had begun orchestrating the hiring of dozens of relatives of powerful government officials in China with the express purpose of winning business, U.S. authorities said Thursday. 

The bank had created a separate channel to get unqualified applicants through the hiring process, and it later began tracking profits from any subsequent business awarded because of the hires, they said.
One candidate was described in an email as “the worst [business analyst] candidate they had ever see[n].” 

Another had a “napping habit” that would be an “eye-opening experience” for New York colleagues. In both instances, the candidates were hired, according to criminal and civil settlements the bank reached with the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve.
All told, the bank hired around 100 applicants referred by government officials at Chinese state-owned firms, and earned at least $35 million as the result of a “corrupt scheme,” according to the settlement documents. 

The agreement ends a multiyear, high-profile investigation that had called into question whether the U.S. government was threatening to criminalize standard business practices in some countries.
J.P. Morgan agreed to pay $264 million and admitted it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—which bars U.S. firms from paying bribes to officials of foreign government in an effort to win business—through its hiring of so-called princelings. 

The Wall Street Journal had reported the outlines of the settlement in July. 

The 75 pages of settlement documents released on Thursday lay bare how the bank had set up a formal structure—dubbed the Sons and Daughters program—to leverage internships and win hundreds of millions of dollars in deals.
Between December 2010 and March 2011, one China-based employee maintained a spreadsheet that linked hires to specific clients, and tracked revenue attributable to those hires, the documents show.
“Some have argued that employment of a child, friend or relative could not possibly induce a foreign official to take action. Today’s action demonstrates the falsity of that assertion,” SEC enforcement director Andrew Ceresney told reporters.
“The so-called Sons and Daughters Program was nothing more than bribery by another name,” said Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
J.P. Morgan spokesman Brian Marchiony said in a statement the bank is “pleased that our cooperation was acknowledged in resolving these investigations” and that the conduct was “unacceptable.” 

Mr. Marchiony said the bank stopped the hiring program in 2013 and “took action against the individuals involved.” 

He added that the bank is still committed to the Asia-Pacific region. 

The agreement said more than two dozen employees had been let go or disciplined in connection with the investigation.
Several other banks are also under investigation for similar hiring practices, including Citigroup Inc., Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.,HSBC Holdings PLC, Morgan Stanley and UBS Group AG, according to regulatory filings. 

The banks declined to comment. 

Mr. Ceresney said he expected additional cases to follow the J.P. Morgan settlement.
The settlement documents cite emails in which J.P. Morgan officials discuss similar tactics they believed other banks were using.
In 2011, one employee asked for a hire to be switched into a permanent job, despite the person’s “undeniable underperformance” because the “deal is large enough [and] we are pregnant enough with this person, that we’d be crazy not to accommodate her father’s wants,” according to an email cited in the agreement.
Also in 2011, one employee asked whether one hire did substantive work. 

“We get real [investment banking] productivity from [the referral hire] or is she a photocopier[?]” “Photocopier,” was the response.
The agreements also show executives questioning why the bank wasn’t doing a better job of leveraging hires.
“We have more [lines of business] in China therefore in theory we can accommodate more ‘powerful’ sons and daughters that could benefit the entire platform,” one of the bank’s managing directors in Asia said in 2009.
In a 2008 exchange, one executive responded when asked about a prospective hire related to a potential client preparing for an IPO: “A couple of points...to discuss and agree prior to any offer being made to her: how do you get the best quid pro quo from the relationship upon confirmation of the offer?”

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.

Yan Lianke’s Novel Assesses the Moral Cost of China’s Growth

By JIAYANG FAN

Yan Lianke 

THE EXPLOSION CHRONICLES
By Yan Lianke
Translated by Carlos Rojas
457 pp. Grove Press. $26.

Here are four scenarios to test one’s ability to differentiate between fact and fiction in modern China: (1) Elderly people hastily kill themselves so that they will be buried traditionally, in tombs, before a cremation law takes effect. 

(2) Thousands of dead pigs float down the river of a major metropolis that supplies drinking water to 26 million residents. 

(3) A village of several hundred inhabitants swells into a city of 20 million, its growth fueled by prostitution and corruption. 

(4) All three story lines are used as inspiration by a Communist Party propagandist-turned-novelist who is both celebrated and censored by a country that can’t make up its mind on whether he should be exalted or exiled.
If all four scenarios seem fantastical, Yan Lianke, the propagandist-turned-writer, will have succeeded in realizing a central theme of “The Explosion Chronicles,” a novel premised on No. 3: that what Yan calls the “incomprehensible absurdity” of contemporary China — elderly people in the city of Anxing reportedly did kill themselves to avoid cremation; thousands of dead pigs did float down the Huangpu River — renders the boundary between reality and fantasy virtually indistinguishable. 

Stylistically, this is not new terrain for Yan, whose fiction has lampooned some of the darkest moments in Chinese history, including the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the 1990s AIDS scandal in his home province of Henan. 

In this latest work, however, Yan shifts his irreverent gaze from the past to the present and toward projections of the future, taking stock of China’s vertiginous economic rise and the astonishing dissolution of its collective social conscience.

“The Explosion Chronicles” traces the ascent of a “fallen fruit” village named Explosion to a city on par with Shanghai and Beijing. 

The levers of power rest within the Kong family (incidentally, also the surname of Confucius), which divvies up political, economic and military might among four brothers. 

Prosperity is the official religion, while prostitution and larceny are among the founding industries. Bribery, fraud and vote-rigging are so common and lucrative that their impropriety is efficiently buried under heaps of money; appropriately, Explosion is soon celebrated for holding the first democratic elections since the founding of the People’s Republic.
The Kongs, who treat Explosion like a familial plot of land to be irrigated with Deng-era watchwords — economic “development zone”; “central policy directives”; Reform and Opening Up campaign — do not only want to install a new dynasty. 

By the time Explosion has been promoted from town to county, the rulers view themselves as gods, and in magic-realist fashion, the moral chaos is horrifyingly reflected in the dysfunction of nature. 

A member of the Kong clan can literally make snow fall from the sky with one document and get flowers to bloom from his pen tip. 

The climate acquiesces to the demands of urban expectation, and everything from squirrels to crickets to shrubbery is reduced to a subject of the Kong empire.
As with Yan’s previous novels, the formal inventiveness of “The Explosion Chronicles” is impressive and its fictional universe vividly drawn. 

But one cannot help wishing it were less an operatic allegory of political principles and more a story, animated by fallible protagonists who are not entirely devoid of moral ambivalence. 

In an Op-Ed for The New York Times in 2014, Yan lamented the costs of China’s economic development. 

“No one can tell us what price should be paid for human feelings, human nature and human dignity,” he wrote. 

“What is the price for abandoning the ideals of democracy, freedom, law and morality?” 

These are grim but urgent questions that affect the varied lives of 1.4 billion. 

I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth, to imagine the answers.