The strange tale of the Chinese dissident student leader, the Qigong master and $50 million
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | 5:00 am
Canwest News Service
There is outrage in Hong Kong that the territory's rule of law and judicial independence are under threat from Beijing after Tiananmen Square student leader Zhou Yongjun was handed over to Chinese police without any legal process.
A week ago, a court in China's Sichuan province sentenced Zhou, who is 42 and has served two prison sentences arising out of his involvement in the 1989 pro-democracy uprising, to nine years in prison for attempted fraud.
But there seems to be more to this story than the erosion of the guarantees given by Beijing to Hong Kong before China regained sovereignty in 1997 that the territory would keep its British civil institutions under the "one country, two systems" rubric.
Of particular interest are perplexing and unexplained links between Zhou and a man named Zhang Hongbao, who made a fortune in China by marketing his own brand of Qigong exercises before fleeing to the United States in 2000, where he set up a putative Chinese government in exile.
Zhang and his female secretary-driver were killed in a somewhat mysterious car crash in Northern Arizona in July 2006.
What remains unclear is whether the Chinese authorities were keen to get hold of Zhou because of his activities as a student dissident or his links to Zhang or both.
On the surface, Zhou has an honourable record as a student dissident.
He was arrested after the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and was jailed for over two years until Beijing bowed to international pressure and allowed him to emigrate to the U.S.
In America, he had legal permanent residence, but not yet citizenship when, in 1998, he returned to China to try to see his aging parents in Sichuan.
Zhou was captured and sentenced to three years in a labour camp. He was released early in 2001 as Beijing put on a show of improving its human rights record in order to cajole the International Olympic Committee into giving it the 2008 Summer Games.
Zhou returned to the U.S., but in September 2008 again attempted to return to China to see his parents out of concern for their condition after the massive Sichuan earthquake.
Now the story gets strange. Zhou says he bought from an immigration company a false Malaysian passport in the name of Wang Xingxiang. He then went to Macau, the former Portuguese colony gambling centre in China's Pearl River Delta, and from there went to Hong Kong.
Why he would go from Macau to Hong Kong instead of straight to Sichuan is an unanswered question, though the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities seem to believe it involved money.
You see, the name Wang Xingxiang in Zhou's false passport is also the real name of the dead Qigong master and leader of the comic opera Chinese government-in-exile, Zhang Hongbao.
And there's a lot of money -the equivalent of well over $50 million – sitting in a Hang Seng bank in Hong Kong in the name of Wang and his mistress, Yan Qingxin.
Now, despite Zhang/Wang having been dead for two years, the bank had recently received several letters from him asking for the money to be transferred to banks overseas.
This the bank declined to do because the signature on the letters was not right. But the bank apparently alerted the Hong Kong police because when Zhou turned up from Macau carrying a passport in the name of Wang Xingxiang, it was this that they wanted to question him about.
Zhou was able, however, to convince the police he had not written the letter to the bank, but they told him that Hong Kong's immigration department still needed to verify his identity.
He was held by Hong Kong immigration for two days, from Sept. 28-30, 2008.
Then the immigration officials did something which has caused all the furore in Hong Kong. They handed Zhou over to Chinese authorities, who whisked him to detention in Sichuan.
There were no legal proceedings, no hearing, no chance for review, nothing. Just a quick push over the border into the waiting arms of the People's Armed Police.
And then, for seven months from Sept. 2008 until mid-May in 2009, the Chinese authorities denied to his frantic parents that they had Zhou in custody. When he was finally put before a court a week ago, the charges of fraud related to Zhou's alleged attempts to get the money from Zhang/ Wang's accounts.
A mystery, which is exercising people in Hong Kong concerned about the case, is why these charges would be brought in China when the alleged offence occurred in Hong Kong.
Another odd thing is that Zhou briefly worked for Zhang in the U.S.
Among the people demanding a slice of the enormous assets of Zhang's frozen estate before the American courts are his wife, his mistress, his housekeeper and Zhou.
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