Texas Businesswoman Formally Charged by China With Spying

Chris Buckley

September 22, 2015

China Formally Arrests U.S. Citizen Accused of Stealing State Secrets

BEIJING — An American businesswoman accused of spying has been formally arrested in China shortly before President Xi Jinping’s trip to the United States, her husband and a family lawyer said on Tuesday, adding to the brew of disputes that have dulled expectations for the visit.

State security officers secretively detained the businesswoman, Phan Phan-Gillis, also known as Sandy, about six months ago, while she was accompanying a delegation of officials and businessmen from Houston in southern China. But her case had gone unreported until Monday, after her husband learned of her formal arrest and decided to speak out and deny that her work as a consultant could have involved spying.

Ms. Phan-Gillis’s husband, Jeff Gillis, said he received the news on Sunday, two days before Mr. Xi was to arrive in Seattle. The timing appeared to be coincidental, but Mr. Gillis said he hoped that Mr. Xi’s visit would open opportunities for the Obama administration to press for her release after months of secretive and fruitless efforts on his own.

“It is the most stupid politics in the world to arrest a U.S. citizen the week that Xi Jinping is coming to the United States for a state visit on political charges of spying,” he said by telephone from Houston, where the couple live.

“I really don’t want to be disruptive. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s party,” he said. “I just want to get my wife back.”

Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, confirmed on Tuesday that Ms. Phan-Gillis had been under investigation “on suspicion of activities harmful to Chinese national security.” He did not say what, specifically, she had been accused of.

“We hope that the outside world will respect China’s handling of this case according to the law,” Mr. Hong said at a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing. “She is also cooperating,” he said of Ms. Phan-Gillis.

The arrest gives the investigators the power to hold Ms. Phan for two months while they examine the charges and decide whether to seek prosecution. Much longer extensions are possible under China’s broad policing powers.

Mr. Gillis said he did not know the details of the accusations against his wife, but he said the assertion that she had been involved in espionage was ludicrous. She made a living as a consultant, helping broker business ventures and investments between China and the United States, including programs to train Chinese nurses, he said.

“Sandy is not a spy,” he said. “Sandy is a hard-working businesswoman who has spent years doing nonprofit-type work to build Houston-China relations.”

Simon Tang, a lawyer based in Houston who has helped the couple, confirmed on Tuesday that Ms. Phan-Gillis had been “formally arrested a few days ago” after months in secretive detention in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi region in southern China. He said her lawyers in China had yet to see the charges in writing but had been told previously that she had been accused of stealing state secrets.

One of the Chinese lawyers representing Ms. Phan-Gillis refused to comment on the case, saying that was not permitted, and another lawyer did not answer calls. Her case was first reported by The Houston Chronicle and The Wall Street Journal.

Under Mr. Xi, the Chinese government has been more vocal about its fears that the country is vulnerable to political and commercial spying.

Ms. Phan-Gillis, 55, is a United States citizen, born in Vietnam and of ethnic Chinese heritage, her husband said. Her background left her particularly vulnerable to arrest in China, he added, noting that previous cases of spying charges against Americans have often involved ethnic Chinese.

“Chinese authorities are very much of the mind that if you are ethnic Chinese, we own you,” Mr. Gillis said.

In the most prominent recent such case, Xue Feng, an American geologist who was born in China, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2011 on charges of industrial espionage. President Obama and senior officials in the United States raised his case before he was released this year.

Mr. Gillis said he was grateful for American consular officers in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, who have made monthly visits to his wife in Guangxi, the neighboring region where she is being held.

But he accused more senior State Department officials of not doing enough to push for Ms. Phan-Gillis’s release, or to use Mr. Xi’s impending visit to raise pressure on the Chinese government. He said he decided to speak publicly about the case out of frustration, and supporters have also started a websitedemanding her release.

“I got the impression that in D.C., they just didn’t really care about my wife,” Mr. Gillis said. “I do not think that you can take a policy that you apply to someone who’s been arrested for shoplifting in France and apply it to somebody who’s been detained by Chinese spies.”

A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Beijing declined to comment and referred questions about the case to the State Department in Washington.

Ms. Phan-Gillis disappeared in March, as she was accompanying a delegation of officials from Houston in southern China, Mr. Gillis said. He said she had called him from Zhuhai, a coastal city, to say that she would stay in China longer than planned, but Mr. Gillis said he saw nothing unusual in that.

But he grew increasingly worried, and after a week or so, he called the United States Consulate in Guangzhou, which confirmed that she was in detention. Mr. Gillis said she had been detained in Zhuhai before a planned crossing into Macau, an adjacent, self-administered Chinese city where mainland security officers would have had no jurisdiction.

Ye Lan, an official in a foreign security section of the Guangdong provincial government, confirmed that Ms. Phan-Gillis had been detained while there but also noted that the investigators had come from neighboring Guangxi.

She was held in Guangxi under “residential surveillance” powers that allowed the authorities to keep her in secretive detention for up to six months, said Mr. Gillis and Mr. Tang, the lawyer. Mr. Gillis said the fact that six months had passed had initially kindled hopes that she might be freed.

Ms. Phan-Gillis is now in a detention center in Nanning, Mr. Gillis said. She needs medicine for a number of chronic ailments, including high blood pressure, and the United States consular officials had to push state security officers to ensure that she received medical treatment, he said.

“State security actually wanted to send me a bill,” he said. “The consulate said no.”