China Finds U.S. Man Guilty of Graft, Other Charges

A Chinese court convicted an American engineer of bribery and obtaining state secrets and sentenced him today to five years in prison, the U.S. Embassy here said.

The case of Fong Fuming of West Orange, N.J., is one of several cases of American citizens, permanent U.S. residents and scholars whose arrests on security-related charges have produced friction between Beijing and Washington.

A U.S. Embassy official and a member of Fong’s family were present at the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Court for the sentencing, which stipulated that Fong will be deported when he completes his jail term. Fong was first detained in February 2000 during a business trip to China, and his time in custody will be subtracted from his sentence, the embassy said.

Fong was acquitted of several lesser bribery and state secrets charges.

He was not indicted until September, and U.S. officials allege that his time in custody violated China’s legal limits on detention without trial.

Chinese officials have said that the sensitive nature of Fong’s case prompted extensions. Another factor was the fate--still unknown--of the Chinese officials accused of receiving the bribes and leaking the secrets.

Fong’s trial was held in October, just after President Bush visited China.

“The trial went all day, and the court was impressed by the spirited defense put up by the Chinese lawyers Fong had retained,” said Jerome Cohen, Fong’s New York-based lawyer and a scholar of the Chinese legal system.

Cohen described the state secrets charges as flawed. Prosecutors “never examined court documents with an eye to determining whether or not they were state secrets, and they didn’t even know what some of the documents were,” he said.

Of the bribery charges, Cohen said, “It isn’t enough to show that money passed between person A and person B, it could have passed for many reasons.

“If businessmen can’t rely on the promise of the Chinese government that the laws will be followed, it’s going to make lot of people insecure.”

A former top engineer of the Zhejiang provincial energy bureau, Fong denied charges that he had paid bribes of $245,000 while conducting business with former associates there. Cohen said that Fong was the victim of an extortion attempt by one of his erstwhile colleagues.

In the late 1980s, Fong moved to the U.S., where he worked as a consultant to several multinational energy companies. He became a U.S. citizen in 1994.

While in jail, Fong has suffered from spinal ailments and is in a state of depression, Cohen said.