By Jerome A. Cohen
Chinese billionaire Sun Dawu
Here is an interesting account of how the criminal process has been used to clip the wings of another important PRC businessman and his business. Billionaire Sun Dawu and more than 20 of his family members were arrested on November 11 and accused of “provoking quarrels and disrupting production.” Authorities also seized control of his company, Hebei Dawu Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Group, which was once of the largest private enterprises in China. Coming soon after the recent last minute blocking of Jack Ma and his hugely profitable Hong Kong IPO for Ant, and the harsh sentence meted out to the outspoken business mogul and critic of the Party Ren Zhiqiang, this could begin to look like a new central campaign to curb the political and economic power of major private entrepreneurs who refuse to follow the central Party line in every respect.
Yet this new Sun case may be more typical of local practices that have existed for decades in the PRC, where one side in a business struggle, having more local political power than the other, calls in the local police to detain its unyielding opponents in the public security detention house or some less supervised coercive environment in order to continue the business negotiations in a setting more likely to produce the desired outcome.
I have been consulted about such cases and gave a talk about this phenomenon at a University of Hawaii-based conference over a decade ago. Locking up such a large number of people in this instance does seem a bit unusual, however. Now that this case has been publicized widely abroad, whether and how the central authorities will attempt to resolve the matter remains to be seen.
Cases like this sometimes sensitize rising entrepreneurs to the failings of the PRC justice system and the importance of human rights that they have long ignored. Occasionally their lawyers get drawn into the human rights struggle through experiences like this.