By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times –
BEIJING — A few years ago, she embodied the rags-to-riches legend of modern China: The daughter of an illiterate farmer starts a hair salon when she is just 15, and in little more than a decade creates a business empire that makes her one of the country’s wealthiest women.
Now the country’s “billionaire sister,” still only 31 and looking much like a schoolgirl with her ponytail and straight-cut bangs, has come to symbolize something far different: opposition to the death penalty.
A provincial court on Jan. 18 upheld Wu Ying’s death sentence on charges of fraud and “illegal fund-raising,” violating legislation aimed at fighting underground banking and loan-sharking. Since then, her cause has won the backing of members of China’s business community, which normally steers clear of politically sensitive human rights issues.
Among her supporters is the editor of the Global Times, a newspaper closely tied to the Communist Party. An online poll found people opposing the death penalty for Wu by a margin of 10 to 1. Those who put themselves on record against it included real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi and technology executive Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google’s China operation.
Lawyers, human rights activists and scholars opposed to imposing the death sentence on Wu gathered this month for a seminar in Beijing. “This case is really about the lack of independence of the Chinese judicial system,” said one participant, Hu Xingdou, an economist with the Beijing Institute of Technology. “Somebody clearly wanted to send Wu Ying to her death.”
Supporters say she didn’t do anything different from many other entrepreneurs, who have to work around a banking system that still favors state-run enterprises, and that her case has had a chilling effect on business. Others say that even if what she did was illegal, she shouldn’t be put to death.
Ambitious young people like Wu grew up believing that they would serve the country by creating businesses and providing jobs, said her father, Wu Yongzheng. “Why is there so much government propaganda about entrepreneurship if people like my daughter get punished?” he said in a telephone interview.
John Kamm, executive director of the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights organization, said Wu Ying’s was a “wedge case.”
“Even for people who support the death penalty, there is a strong feeling that you shouldn’t kill people for economic crimes,” he said. “That is simply barbaric.”
China is one of only a few countries that impose the death penalty for economic crimes, Kamm said. It revised its criminal code last year to remove 13 nonviolent crimes from the list of those punishable by death. The Dui Hua Foundation says the number of executions has been cut by about half since 2007, when the Supreme Court began reviewing death sentences imposed by local and provincial courts.
But still, about 4,000 people are executed each year, the highest number in the world, Dui Hua says.
The Supreme Court has announced its intention to review Wu’s sentence, and issued a rare public statement last week promising to “strictly abide by the truth.”
The oldest of four daughters of a rice farmer, Wu dropped out of a vocational high school in the coastal province of Zhejiang, south of Shanghai, to work in an aunt’s hair salon. Then she started her own. A string of other businesses followed: a car rental agency, a karaoke club, a foot massage parlor and a cosmetic company that made face creams from lamb placenta.
Her company, Bense Holding Group, announced plans to expand into petrochemicals and construction.
By the time she was 26, she was ranked as the sixth-wealthiest woman in China, with assets estimated at more than $500 million — worth billions in Chinese currency. Nicknamed the “billionaire sister,” she appeared in magazine profiles, always wearing either all black or all white. Her company owned Ferraris and BMWs.
Her downfall was just as sudden. In late 2006, one of her creditors kidnapped her for eight days, a practice not uncommon in Zhejiang’s underground lending business. She acknowledged afterward that she was experiencing a “cash flow” problem. In February 2007, local authorities arrested her and confiscated property, including apartments, 41 cars and a stash of jade.
In 2009, she was convicted and sentenced to death for illegally raising millions of dollars from investors for businesses, including hotels, construction, real estate and foreign trade, that never came to fruition.
