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Hostage ? - USA - Held In China
David Ji used a few good contacts in his homeland to build a billion-dollar business selling cheap DVD players in the U.S. Then he crossed a supplier--and disappeared...
USA -Forbes, by Stephane Fitch -13 Feb 2006: -- This is the dark side of doing business in a booming China, where government often is your partner, the lines between state and enterprise are blurry and respect for defendant rights is spotty at best... The video is dull and grainy, but it shows real-life drama: A comeuppance for David Ji, a celebrated U.S.-bred entrepreneur who built a billion-dollar business importing dirt-cheap DVD players from a booming China, where he was born, and selling them at Wal-Mart and Circuit City stores in the U.S., his adopted home for two decades. As the camera rolled last December, Ji--a U.S. citizen held against his will in Shanghai by the authorities--glumly says he has signed over control of his company, Apex Digital, to a government-owned supplier that has accused him of a massive fraud... In the U.S. a spat over bills owed to a supplier can get you sued; in China it can get you jailed for months before any charges are filed. David Ji is one of a dozen or so U.S. businessmen detained without due process in the past decade in China (see box, p. 148). An implicit racism is evident in these cases: Most of the jailed execs are Asian-Americans, and even U.S. citizens get held... The Chinese attitude is "Hey, you are, at least ethnically speaking, Chinese. You should know how the system works," says John T. Kamm, founder of Dui Hua, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that helps people wrongfully imprisoned in China. "These cases are many, and the business world should be troubled by them," says Jerome Cohen, a New York University professor who specializes in China's legal system. He has advised Ji's defense. "Many of these cases never get reported," he adds, citing "interference from local police, prosecutors and corrupt judges occasionally cooperating with local powerholders"... A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles says, "This is a business dispute, but it is also a fraud. David Ji is being investigated for cheating people with bad checks." He denied "rumors" that Ji has been mistreated. "This is simply not true. We treat everyone arrested in these cases in the most humanitarian way."...
posted by Unknown @ 9:41 AM
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