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.