In violation of its own laws, China has been holding a 66-year-old US engineer for the past one and a half years on suspicion that he bribed officials for secret documents, an attorney for his family said yesterday.
News of Fong Fuming's detention comes six weeks before US President George W. Bush is due on his first visit to China since taking office.
Fong's family had previously kept silent about his detention, hoping that quiet appeals might win his release and avoid embarrassing friends and family in China, including Fong's 94-year-old mother, said Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University expert in Chinese law.
But after meetings with State Department officials and congressional staff and because of their mounting concern over Fong's treatment, his family has gone public in hopes that Bush's visit may provide leverage to secure his freedom, said Cohen, who is advising Fong's family.
"The next step is to hope that the US government, with the benefit of publicity ... will be able to reach high enough into the Chinese hierarchy so that some leader is going to say: `Get rid of this case, it's a loser, it's killing us, why are we doing it?"' Cohen said in an interview from New York.
Fong, an electrical engineer from West Orange, New Jersey, is the latest in a series of American citizens and residents detained in China on vague security charges. In July, China convicted an American business professor and two Chinese citizens with US residency rights on spying charges. But then it released them to prevent their cases from spoiling a visit by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The US Embassy in Beijing said it has been working with Fong's attorneys, family and prosecutors to safeguard his rights and that a US diplomat has visited him frequently.
Fong, whose wife and two sons are also US citizens, was a senior power official in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang before he moved to the US. He became a US citizen in 1994, and worked as a consultant to foreign firms interested in power projects in China and elsewhere in Asia, Cohen said.
He was detained on Feb. 28 last year as he arrived in Beijing to meet an American power company bidding for a contract.
Chinese authorities accused Fong of bribing bid officials to obtain technical documents -- which they claimed were secret -- apparently about previous projects similar to the one that the American firm bid for and later won, Cohen said.
But authorities have been unable to prove the charge, Cohen said. They did not formally arrest Fong until a year ago and still have not indicted him, violating China's criminal procedure law, he said. Fong says he did not know that the documents, which he stored on his computer, were secret, Cohen said. They were not marked secret, Cohen said.
Fong has been interrogated just twice in the last six months, both times after the US Embassy in Beijing questioned Chinese authorities about his case, he said. A bail request three weeks ago went unanswered, even though Chinese law required a response within a week.
"His sons are very upset now. They have gone from an attitude of being patient and trying to be understanding to an attitude of being really angered at the abuse they feel their father's been subjected too," Cohen said.
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