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China indicts US resident for spying

Gao Zhan (高瞻), a permanent US resident accused of spying for Taiwan, has been indicted and will probably stand trial later this month in Beijing, one of her lawyers said Tuesday.

Her indictment comes just days after her friend and fellow scholar, Li Shaomin (李少民), was convicted of spying in a related case and ordered deported from the country. Gao's fate is less certain than that of Li, however, because unlike Li, a naturalized American, she is a Chinese citizen.

"Li, as a foreigner, could be deported, but she's a Chinese national," said Jerome Cohen, a law professor at New York University who represents Gao's family in the US. Cohen has urged China to release Gao because the charges against her are even weaker than those made against Li.

The arrests of Li and Gao, as well as those of several other Chinese-born American citizens or permanent residents, have complicated US-China relations at a time when both sides are eager to mend fences following the April collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet.

Earlier this month, in a telephone conversation with China's president, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), US President George W. Bush urged that all the cases be resolved promptly.

But Gao's case now threatens to mar a visit to China by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in two weeks. More important, perhaps, her case and others like it have cast a pall over academic research in China, where it is often difficult to tell what information is regarded as classified and what is free to be distributed abroad.

Gao was arrested at Beijing's airport on Feb. 11 as she, her husband and their son were preparing to board a flight to the US after visiting her parents. Li was arrested two weeks later after he crossed into China from Hong Kong, where he worked as a professor of marketing at City University of Hong Kong.

The Chinese government said that both confessed to spying for Taiwan, though Li was not indicted until June 18 and Gao's lawyers were not informed of her indictment until Tuesday. It was not until Gao was able to meet with a lawyer for two and a half hours on July 10 -- her first and only communication with the outside world in more than five months -- that it became clear that her case and Li's were related.

Gao and Li, both sociologists working on topics related to China, became acquainted at academic conferences. When Gao was pursuing her doctorate at the University of Syracuse a decade ago, she asked Li's advice about paying for her studies. Li introduced her to academic foundations in Taiwan, a common source of financial support for Western-based scholars studying China.

Later, Cohen said, Li asked Gao for help in collecting documents regarding China's analysis of cross-strait relations and the general situation in Taiwan. Gao, in turn, asked for help from a mainland friend who had access to such material, and was given photocopies of speeches, magazine articles and book excerpts on the subject, which she passed on to Li.

According to Cohen, Gao knew that some of those articles and excerpts came from so-called neibu (內部) publications. Neibu, which means "internal" in Chinese, is a vague government classification that indicates that something is intended for limited distribution to people with varying degrees of official status, though many neibu publications now circulate freely and some are even available on the shelves of public book stores.

Gao told the lawyer on July 10 that she was not aware when she obtained the materials that any of them were considered state secrets, a higher level of classification intended for restricted distribution.

"She didn't see the originals," Cohen said Tuesday by telephone from New York. "Nothing on the photocopies indicated they were state secrets."

Li was accused of collecting the materials for the Military Intelligence Bureau of Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, precipitating both Gao's arrest and his own.

Now that Gao has been indicted, her conviction is virtually assured because such cases rarely advance to the point of court proceedings unless the government is confident of the verdict.

But her attorneys are hoping that her sentence will not exceed the time she has already served in detention, given that her case is apparently less serious than that of Li, who drew no sentence at all other than deportation.

Although Li was originally accused of passing state secrets to Taiwan, the official New China News Agency reported only that he had been convicted of harming national security by collecting qing bao, (情報) or intelligence, which in China includes material that is in the public domain but that the government does not want disseminated abroad.

In August 1999, Song Yongyi, a researcher at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania who had been collecting published documents from the Cultural Revolution, was detained on charges of sending state secrets abroad but was eventually released without being indicted after it was determined that the material in question fell under the looser classification of "intelligence."

But because Gao has been indicted, she faces a greater risk than Song did. If she is convicted under Article 110 of the criminal code, the provision under which Li was originally indicted, she could face a prison sentence that usually ranges from 10 years to life.

Gao's case will be heard in a closed session by three judges of the Beijing Intermediate People's Court No. 1, the same court in which Li's trial was held. Because she is not an American citizen, however, no American diplomat will be present to observe the proceedings, as was the case at Li's trial.

Defendants and their lawyers normally have little time to prepare for trial because the prosecution's evidence is only made available after the court has received the case, and the trial can begin as soon as 10 days after the court notifies the parties that there will be a trial.

It is not clear where Li or Gao are being held, or when Li will be deported or even where he will be deported to. A written verdict in Li's case was issued late Monday afternoon, and so his deportation could come at any time. His home is in Hong Kong, but that is part of China and it isn't clear whether or not he will be allowed to return there.

The US Embassy said Tuesday that it was seeking details of Li's release, although according to the two countries' bilateral consular agreement, China is not obligated to notify the US of Li's deportation.

An embassy spokesman said that Washington continues to "urge the Chinese government to promptly resolve Gao's case so that she may be reunited with her family."

The spokesman said the US is also urging the Chinese government to resolve the cases of others who have been similarly detained.
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