EXCLUSIVE
Beijing: A Melbourne grandmother who protested her innocence after being listed by Chinese authorities among its most-wanted international fugitives will be prosecuted on corruption charges, despite voluntarily returning to China in an attempt to clear her name.
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Zhou Shiqin, 64, denies accusations she embezzled millions of yuan from the state-owned railway authority she worked at as an accountant more than a decade ago, before immigrating to Australia.
Her decision to volunteer herself to the whims of China's opaque judicial system by returning home in April stemmed from the psychological pressure of having her photo and Interpol red notice emblazoned across Chinese state media outlets, and her younger sister's assets being frozen in China in connection with her case.
Ms Zhou, a decades-long Communist Party member and state railway authority employee, believed a renewed investigation – driven by central authorities as part of President Xi Jinping's sweeping Fox Hunt and Sky Net anti-corruption operations – would exonerate her and expose the low-level officials who had implicated her.
"She believed she not only had the chance to clear her name, but to deal with her sister's problem," her Melbourne-based lawyer, Ma Hean, told Fairfax Media.
"She always believed the judicial organs would 'seek truth from facts', she was full of confidence in them."
That confidence now appears misplaced. On Monday, anti-corruption investigators in the north-eastern city of Shenyang lodged her case with court prosecutors, charging her with corruption.
The return of international 'fugitives' through the Fox Hunt and Sky Net operations, whether voluntarily or via extradition, has been the subject of triumphant state media coverage. It is part of a coordinated propaganda effort designed to dissuade corrupt officials from absconding overseas, while warning those already on the run they had no safe haven from the long arm of the law.
An eight-part documentary series trumpeting President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive has been airing in primetime on state broadcaster CCTV. Tuesday's instalment, which focused on Operation Sky Net, saw Ms Zhou feature in a brief excerpt of a news report when she handed herself in to police in April.
The series was timed to coincide with this week's Sixth Plenum, a top-level closed-door Communist Party conclave. The four-day policy meeting in Beijing, involving the country's top 300 party officials, is expected to focus on party discipline and loyalty, while further cementing Mr Xi's power base as jostling ahead of a key leadership reshuffle next year begins in earnest.
Mr Ma said he had weighed two plausible outcomes with his client before she returned to China, with her adult son Chen Peng. The first, more optimistic scenario, he said, was that after closely examining the evidence Chinese authorities could have exonerated her and used her as a high-profile demonstration of the fair application of the law.
The negative scenario was that the profile of the case and international pursuit of Ms Zhou, who is an Australian permanent resident, meant nothing but a guilty verdict would be counted as a failure.
"Unfortunately, the latter scenario now appears very likely," Mr Ma said. "Even if it's finding a small technicality, they must hand down a sentence in order to be answerable."
When Chinese authorities were convincing Ms Zhou to return to answer her charges, they had appeared open to examining evidence she had compiled which she said proved her innocence. That tone, Mr Ma said, turned sour around July, when authorities began to implicitly threaten her relatives in mainland China, including her son, if she refused to cooperate and "confess".
In what appears to be a face-saving compromise, and a partial concession there were issues with her original charges, Ms Zhou is now likely to be pinned with lesser corruption-related crimes.
Instead of the lengthy sentence associated with embezzling millions of yuan, prosecutors have reopened an older case involving a third party who was convicted of dealing with the proceeds of corruption. That person had accepted an apartment as repayment of a debt owed to them by the railway authority, before selling it on to Ms Zhou. Ms Zhou's superior, who assigned the property as repayment of the debt, was not authorised to do so.
Mr Ma, who has previously worked as a prosecutor in China, said the best-case scenario for Ms Zhou was now a suspended sentence. But from a legal perspective, he said reopening the old case was "absurd".
Tuesday's instalment of the CCTV anti-corruption documentary series featured an interview with Liu Jianchao, the man in charge of China's efforts to repatriate graft suspects globally. He said China had been given a "political promise" from "certain Western countries" that they would not become havens for "corrupt elements".
It comes as China seeks to advance discussions on bilateral extradition treaties with numerous Western countries in the hope it provides even greater leverage when pursuing corruption suspects who have fled overseas.
A parliamentary joint standing committee will decide next month whether it will recommend the Australian government ratify its extradition treaty with China, which was first signed in 2007 but never ratified. The ratification process was revived last year but then put on hold once more when July's federal election was called.
In response to questions after a media briefing in December, Mr Liu told Fairfax Media that Sky Net suspects were only targeted if there were sufficient evidence. He said if a suspect "felt they were innocent" they could return to China and prove so through their lawyers and "investigations in accordance with the law".
"Thus there will not be a case of a factually innocent [suspect] being sentenced guilty," Mr Liu told Fairfax Media. "If you are aware of any of such case, please let me know."