China’s ‘most wanted’ fugitive ‘wants to go home’ after 13 years on run
The suspect at the top of central government’s most wanted list of alleged corrupt officials and economic criminals that have fled overseas has given up her efforts to seek political asylum in the US and could be sent back to the mainland as early as next month.
Yang Xiuzhu, 70, the former deputy mayor of Wenzhou – in the eastern province of Zhejiang – has lived in exile for the past 13 years.
But Yang’s health was starting to deteriorate and she had made up her mind to forgo her application for political asylum in the United States and head back to China to seek better medical treatment, her lawyer Vlad Kuzmin said.
“[Yang] keeps calling me three or four times a day on average and asking me when she can be back [in China],” Kuzmin was quoted as saying by World Journal, a New York-based Chinese language newspaper, which is an offshoot of Taiwan’s United Daily Group.
According to the report, Kuzmin said Yang was feeling homesick. She fled China for Singapore in 2003 before heading to the US, via the Netherlands.
Yang was held in the Netherlands in 2005, but jumped bail and flew to Canada just before Dutch officials were due to repatriate her in 2014.
However, she was arrested again when she tried to enter the United States using a counterfeit passport.
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It was at this stage that she applied for political asylum in the United States.
Mainland officials previously alleged that Yang had accepted bribes totalling 250 million yuan (HK$290 million).
After coming to power in late 2012, President Xi Jinping launched Operation Fox Hunt to pursue corrupt officials and economic criminals fleeing overseas.
The campaign was later expanded into a full-scale Operation Sky Net, which involved various government agencies, including the police and central bank.
The “Fox Hunt 2015” campaign succeeded in detaining more than 850 fugitives abroad from 66 countries or regions.
Most of the Chinese fugitives that have been repatriated over the past few years have been businesspeople, while those party officials that have been caught are relatively low ranking cadres.
Kuzmin was quoted by World Journal as saying that his law firm, on Yang’s behalf, had submitted the relevant documents to abandon her application for political asylum to both the immigration court affiliated with the US Department of Justice, and lawyers representing the US government.
The immigration court usually took between one and four weeks to review cases such as Yang’s – as long as all procedures ran smoothly – before it would be able to make a decision on whether Yang could return to China, Kuzmin said.
