U.S.-Based Chinese Scholar Denies Spy Charges

Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING (Reuters) - A U.S.-based Chinese scholar and pro-democracy activist will plead not guilty when he goes on trial in China behind closed doors on charges of spying for Taiwan and illegal entry, his wife and lawyer said on Tuesday.

The trial of Yang Jianli at the Beijing Number Two Intermediate People's Court next Monday comes one month after the U.S. House of Representatives condemned his incommunicado detention without due process and called for his release.

Yang, 40, a permanent U.S. resident, was held by China's security forces for 15 months before he was indicted on July 14.

There was uncertainty over what sentence he might face. His wife, Christina Fu, told Reuters by telephone from Boston that he could be sentenced to death if convicted of espionage, but his lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said Yang faced a maximum of life in prison.

Fu was convinced Yang, a Chinese national who had been blacklisted and barred from returning to China, was innocent.

"I know for sure Yang Jianli is not a spy. They have no evidence," said Fu, a U.S. citizen and a researcher at Harvard Medical School.

"But I'm worried. What can I do if they are determined to press such charges against him?" she said, adding that she had been denied a Chinese visa to attend the trial.

Yang was arrested in April 2002 after entering China on a friend's passport and traveling for a week with a fake identity card, mainly to observe labor unrest in the northeastern rust belt.

A court spokesman said he had not heard of Yang's name.

SPY FOR TAIWAN?

Yang's wife said the indictment accused him of "accepting missions" from officials of Taiwan's Nationalist Party during visits to the democratic island in the 1990s.

The Nationalists, or Kuomintang, fled the Chinese mainland for Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to the Communists. They ruled the island until defeat in presidential elections in 2000.

Beijing and Taipei are still military and political rivals despite booming trade and flourishing cultural exchanges since detente began in the late 1980s. Taiwan businessmen have poured up to $100 billion into China and academic exchanges are common.

Fu, who has been lobbying the White House, the U.S. Congress and the State Department to help win her husband's release, criticized China for keeping her husband incommunicado.

"There has been no news whatsoever. This is unreasonable," said Fu, who visited Beijing last year and tried in vain to see her husband. "I haven't seen or talked to him" for 15 months.

Yang is the second exiled Chinese dissident to fall foul of Beijing, which considers Taiwan a rebel province that must be returned to the fold, by force if necessary.

In February, a court in the southern boom town of Shenzhen jailed U.S.-based democracy activist Wang Bingzhang for life on terrorism and espionage charges -- the first time the terrorism charge had been used to convict a democracy campaigner.

Yang had been blacklisted by China and unable to return since 1989 when he returned to China and participated in pro-democracy demonstrations that were crushed by the army in June that year.

He earned a PhD from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in political economy and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Source: "Reuters".