Times Researcher Indicted in China

International Herald Tribune – December 24, 2005

Jim Yardley, N.Y. Times

BEIJING A Chinese researcher for The New York Times was indicted Friday on a charge of revealing state secrets to the newspaper and also on a lesser charge of fraud, a move that should send the case to trial within six weeks, his lawyer said.

The researcher, Zhao Yan, 43, who worked in the newspaper's Beijing bureau, has spent 15 months in prison without a hearing. He has denied the charges, as has The Times, and his lawyers say he has refused efforts by investigators to obtain a confession. The indictment is significant because such a move on state secrets charges is usually tantamount to conviction in China.

Zhao could face a minimum of 10 years in prison. His arrest is directly linked to a Sept. 7, 2004, story in The Times disclosing that former President Jiang Zemin had unexpectedly offered to resign his last leadership post as head of the military. The ruling Communist Party is acutely sensitive to any reporting on the secretive inner workings of the top leadership.

Zhao's arrest has brought China widespread international condemnation, including criticism from the U.S. government. This month, President George W. Bush included Zhao on a list of troubling human rights cases that he handed to President Hu Jintao during their meeting in Beijing.

Zhao's lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said the belabored manner in which the case had been handled underscored its controversial nature and possible uncertainty by prosecutors. Twice, prosecutors in Beijing sent the case back to the State Security Bureau for further investigation.

Under Chinese law, Friday was the last working day for prosecutors to decide whether to go forward with the case.

"There is a question as to whether they have full confidence in their own evidence," Mo said by telephone from the western Chinese city of Yulin.

Mo said he had been notified of the indictment but had not received a copy of the formal indictment letter. He expected the letter to be filed in court in the coming week and would include the charges as well as a list of evidence in the case. Under China's rules of procedure, Mo said, a trial must be held within six weeks, though prosecutors can ask for an extension of one month.

The indictment letter would also indicate whether prosecutors had decided to charge Zhao with leaking a "juemi," or a high-level form of state secret, as has been recommended by state security agents. If so, he would face at least 10 years in prison. Lesser categories of state secrets bring lighter sentences.

The fraud charge came several months after Zhao's arrest and is connected to allegations from 2001, before his employment with The Times.

Investigators allege that he offered to write a favorable story in a Chinese newspaper about someone in exchange for money. A witness has come forward disputing the charge, and Mo has denied the allegation.

Usually, a state secrets trial is closed, and it is unclear whether Mo will be allowed to mount an aggressive defense. Mo has indicated that he would try to call Joseph Kahn, The Times' Beijing bureau chief, as a defense witness. But foreigners are not allowed in such proceedings, much less foreign journalists.

Once a muckraking journalist who exposed official corruption and wrote about the abuses endured by farmers, Zhao started working in The Times' office in Beijing in April 2004. He was arrested on Sept. 17 that year, after state security agents tracked him to a Pizza Hut in Shanghai. Agents had targeted him after a high-level investigation was ordered in response to the article in The Times about Jiang.

That article, written by Kahn, cited two anonymous sources in reporting Jiang's resignation offer. (Jiang later did resign the military post.) The Times has said that neither source was Zhao.

Indeed, according to a confidential state security report, the crucial piece of evidence is a photocopy of a handwritten note that Zhao wrote to Kahn two months before the publication of the article.

The note describes some jockeying between Jiang and Hu over military appointments. Kahn later included a reference to such jockeying as background material in one of the final paragraphs in the Sept. 7 article.

A central question is how state security agents obtained the photocopy. The original note remains in The Times office in Beijing, suggesting either that agents entered the office without permission or enlisted someone to help them make a copy. In either instance, the note should be inadmissible under Chinese law, legal experts say.

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