China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  Unconscious of the drama happening in their midst, the milling crowd still scrabbled for their suitcases and clawed their way away from the carousel. Inadvertently clubbed on the side of the head with a suitcase by a retreating businessman as he fell forward, Julie’s attacker subsided among the feet of the now diminishing crowd.

  ‘Alice?’

  Julie was unaware that her call was uttered at such high volume. She couldn’t see Alice anywhere, even as the mass of passengers rapidly dispersed to the various exits from the baggage hall.

  Then she realised that she could hear her.

  Alice’s hysterical screams of ‘No, no, no!’ served only to energise the thug trying to drag her to the exit and out of the terminal building. Not understanding English, he nonetheless knew that the anguished tone of her screams was dangerous as it would attract attention; violently silencing her, however, would have had a similar effect.

  As they were in the Domestic Terminal, the man’s route seemed straightforward enough. There should be no more officialdom for him to get past.

  ‘Alice!’

  The baggage hall was suddenly empty. The two remaining suitcases circling the carousel, one of which was Julie’s and Alice’s, were pulled off by a porter.

  The thug turned to see who was calling out to his prisoner. He saw Julie but the sudden look of panic on his face told Julie that he had seen something else as well. And, in the moment of inattention, when he turned back to continue his escape, he found himself confronting a policeman pointing his handgun at him in a two-handed stance.

  Julie edged forward. The policeman took aim at the thug’s lower body.

  Julie didn’t at first realise that it wasn’t this policeman who fired.

  A sharp intake of breath followed by a curse that Julie didn’t understand signified that behind her someone had been shot. A massive reverberation of firepower rattled around the baggage reclaim area as several handguns were discharged.

  The thug at the exit thrust Alice away from him and dropped to his knees, arms raised. It was a motion of surrender; he hadn’t been hit.

  ‘Alice, Alice?’

  Julie reached the shaking young woman in very few strides and folded her into her arms. It was only when she looked back over Alice’s shoulder that she was able to see what had happened behind her.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ she said.

  There were four men. One, a uniformed policeman, was standing over a body on the floor slumped up against the side of the baggage carousel. A second man, sitting on Julie’s suitcase, was nursing his upper arm; the blood seeping through his jacket sleeve suggesting that he was the man who had been shot and who had uttered the curse. The fourth person, who appeared to have just arrived at the scene immediately took charge.

  As more police and medics materialised, this fourth man picked up the now-abandoned suitcase and handed it to Julie as she came forward dragging a ‘living dead’ Alice behind her.

  As the surviving thug was led away, the man who had retrieved the suitcase gestured for the two women to leave the reclaim area.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Julie automatically.

  A look of mixed surprise and contempt crept across the man’s face.

  Snotty bastard! Julie said to herself, the nameless man’s body language and facial expressions telling her that he was probably someone high up in the Chinese Security Service who had suddenly got drawn into something rather distasteful.

  If she had ever got to talking to Susie Peveral, temporarily of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, she would have found that her analysis was accurate. The use of David Hutchinson as a monitor to reassure the outside world that China was dealing with the people trafficking business vigorously and ruthlessly was one side of a coin. The other was to put their best brains to work at sorting out the complex of activities and interactions behind the scenes that they didn’t want David to see. Julie’s role, to the Chinese, this sour official included, was a part of this other side.

  The black 4x4 BMW was parked in the pick-up area exactly where Julie had been told to expect it. The back windows were tinted, though in this instance with the intention of preventing the occupants from seeing out rather than the more usual intention of preventing the curious from looking in.

  Julie had no idea where they had been taken to. It wasn’t a hotel; it had an internal basement garage and was, as far as Julie could determine, a very luxurious apartment block. The apartment that she and Alice were taken to had no staff, but the bodyguard in the vestibule was clearly there to prevent them leaving. It was getting late and, again according to her instructions, all that she and Alice had to do was to settle in and wait.

  Julie found the sudden return to the normal processes of living unreal. It was if all that had happened to them in the last few days had been in her imagination.

  It was dark outside. On Julie’s urging, Alice took a shower and then she showered herself before they prepared themselves for bed; there really wasn’t anything else for them to do. Belatedly, Julie realised that the apartment had no television set. As instructed, Julie didn’t give Alice any further medication. Alice without medication was a situation that she knew that she would have to face. By the next morning Alice would be free of the drugs and her reactions were likely to be as unpredictable as they had ever been.

  ‘Mr Hutchinson.’

  As Julie and Alice slept in, Janice Liang joined the journalist at breakfast at the Yu Garden Hotel.

  David noted the coldness and the careful way that Janice held herself back when the conversation got under way. He assumed that she had been told to be businesslike and not too friendly.

  ‘I’m informed that the young woman we are interested in has arrived in Shanghai. There was an incident at the airport but that has been dealt with. Surveillance of the various parties has been stepped up. We understand that the final meeting will take place in two days.’

  Janice had briefed David as far as she was allowed to the previous evening. He knew that he was being used, with the connivance of his government, and that what he would be shown and told would be selective. David’s briefings from Susie Peveral, his work on people trafficking in the UK and the information that Janice had given him meant that he was very clear about what was about to happen and what he was to verify as having happened. Anything else was supposed to be unseen by him.

  An old Goon Show quote shot through David’s mind – ‘dashed cunning these Chinese’.

  Janice also shared some further information that suggested that the Chinese authorities were taking the opportunity presented by the exposure of some of the corrupt businessmen, and the government officials who were protecting them, to close down a whole range of illegal activities. And being China there was also an element of political manipulation going on.

  People’s National Daily

  Shanghai English-language Edition –

  Monday, 20 September 2010

  CORRUPTION REACHES DEEP INTO GOVERNMENT

  The arrest of businessman Hu Ziyang on charges of theft, misappropriation of government funds and property has caused consternation among both government and business circles. Police with officials of the Internal Revenue department and the Shanghai Communist Party raided Mr Hu’s house on the edge of the Changning District and his city offices. A large quantity of papers was seized at both locations.

  Mr Hu is known to have extensive contacts in the finance, business and governmental worlds. Starting life as a government accountant, he became a banker and most recently a bond trader on the US, UK and European markets. The source of the funds that Mr Hu traded in these external markets is reported to be a major area of investigation.

  Mr Hu’s wife, Rose Zhu, originally a UK citizen, has also been detained by the police and her movements between China and the UK investigated. The British City of London Police has been asked to provide information on her trips to London, including any of her travelling companions. The suspicion that her visits were used as a vehicle to transfer sig
nificant funds out of China was not denied by the head of the international branch of the Ministry of Finance.

  Several business associates of Mr Hu and key family members are being interviewed by police; others remain at liberty for the present. At a press conference the Head of the Major Fraud Department of the Ministry of Finance confirmed that there was evidence that Mr Hu had extensive contacts in the criminal world, but the suspicion that he had been funding the trafficking of illegal workers into both Australia and the UK was categorised as speculation, though not denied.

  At least three government officials in Beijing and an unspecified number in Hong Kong have also been arrested on charges of corruption. While the extradition status of Chinese citizens in the UK is uncertain, the British police have nonetheless been asked to arrest two bankers in London, one of whom is a relative of Mr Hu. The suicide of one of Mr Hu’s cousins in Houston, Texas, in the USA was confirmed by police as being related.

  35

  The news of the arrest of a number of businessmen and their associates was deliberately withheld from the Chinese media for several days and not picked up by the world media for almost a week. To the Communist authorities, this was a fairly minor piece of media management. Not only did the public at large not realise that a major anti-corruption exercise was under way until it was largely complete, but as a result of the structured way that the arrests had been made, the key players in what were to be the final stages of the crackdown were also kept in ignorance. This secrecy, however, was a major achievement, Chinese officialdom being notoriously leaky.

  ‘They don’t even know who the good guys are, let alone who among the Communist elite are bad guys,’ Susie Peveral said to David Hutchinson in a hurried mobile phone call. ‘The word on the street in Hong Kong is that the canker reaches way up the hierarchy.’

  It was a dangerous statement to make, even for a British diplomat, on an open line, but Susie realised that David would need to know just how fragile were the relationships that he might get involved with.

  Hu Hengsen was one of those who knew nothing about the arrests. Something of a recluse, he spent most of his time at his luxurious country house several kilometres outside of Shanghai. The anti-corruption authorities were counting on this. Mr Hu, in common with many of the new Chinese oligarch generation, like their Russian counterparts, had close and often convoluted relations both with government officials but also, more dangerously, with politicians. The relationship was mutually beneficial, but a growing awareness among the very highest ranks of politicians that the corruption was beginning to undermine the burgeoning national growth rate and feed discontent that might threaten the Communist grip on power meant that counteraction was inevitable.

  Being aware that the Western world regarded the convoluted and corrupt relations between the less scrupulous of businessmen, officials and politicians as unacceptable for a country of China’s status, the Chinese President had ordered firm action. Also being aware that the Western world regarded transparency as being as important as integrity, the project to use David Hutchinson as an independent observer was, to every-body’s total amazement, established. Keeping him at arm’s length from the official British establishment, and holding Susie Peveral in Hong Kong, was insurance against accusations of external influence over the journalist’s eventual report.

  The Security Service, being more alive to the risks than the often aged and remote Party leaders, had been developing its own countermeasures for some time. Mr Hu was unaware of the extent of their penetration of his business organisation. For some time, the penetration had been benign because the Security Service was in effect riding on the back of Mr Hu’s overseas business dealings as a means of gaining intelligence and of building its organisation in Western countries. This had been the most successful in the US and particularly South America where the Chinese communities were more under pressure from local priorities and the assumption that Chinese loyalties were always to China.

  This was a myth that Susie Peveral had warned David about.

  ‘There’s always an undercurrent in the Americas around the idea that mainland China will always command Chinese loyalties over local citizenship wherever Chinese people settle. Since most of the Chinese communities in the UK and other Commonwealth countries have origins in Hong Kong or Singapore, this is not a view that is prevalent with us.’

  But, as Susie knew full well from her work on people trafficking, there were nonetheless other aspects of the UK Chinese communities that were equally undesirable. One of the reasons why Hu Hengsen was of interest to the Chinese Security Services was that his organisation had established itself very successfully among the Hong Kong-based activities in the UK and Europe, both through his extensive family connections in the former colony and by his corruption of a number of lesser Chinese diplomats and trade officials. And, like his cousin Hu Ziyang, who was now languishing in a Beijing prison, Mr Hu was moving into consolidating his financial position outside mainland China and with it ensuring his own security by engineering the movement of both his own funds and those of his associates in official and political circles. Mr Hu was a business associate of Mr Shi and an extensive user of the objectionable Mr Xu’s services. However, unlike his cousin he lacked an emissary like Rose Zhu to facilitate the movements of his money to the fullest extent. This was the deficiency that he was about to try to remedy.

  ‘Mr Hu is very rich. His basic source of wealth was initially largely legitimate and comes from both property development and manufacturing. But, like so many of his kind, he is beginning to move into illegal activities, particularly the exporting of his private capital abroad.’

  The Chinese authorities were very clear about the distinction between private capital and sovereign wealth and what each might be used for.

  Janice Liang had joined David Hutchinson for breakfast at his hotel. It was part of her role to keep him abreast of the events that the Chinese authorities wanted him to verify. The arrest of Hu Ziyang and his associates was something that he needed to know about but was not central to the eventual arrest of Hu Hengsen; it was Hu Hengsen that Janice was concentrating on. The Chinese authorities had special plans for him and were at great pains to keep him in ignorance of what was going on among his associates and colleagues.

  This was not an easy task but it was a tribute to the sort of control that the Communist authorities could exert – when it felt it needed to – that it was so successful. The authorities knew, of course, that this success was time-limited.

  At no time was it made clear to David why Hu Hengsen was being singled out in the way he was. David’s assumption that it might be based on something personal rather than political or business led wasn’t too far from the mark.

  ‘Through contacts with at least one Russian oligarch and a merchant bank owned by a group of Hong Kong businessmen, who all appear to be totally ignorant of Mr Hu’s plans and activities, he has opened a number of bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and, we believe, Jersey. All of these bank accounts have only nominal sums in them at present but there is emerging evidence that Mr Hu is planning to make large transfers of money held in the PRC – on both his own behalf and, we believe, for others – into them. These transactions, for which he obviously has no approval, and for which he is clearly not planning to seek approval, amount to a significant portion of his total wealth.’

  ‘Hang on, Janice,’ interrupted David, ‘what the hell has this got to do with people trafficking. People trafficking of what you called high-class women?’

  David hadn’t been paying much attention since he couldn’t relate what this woman was saying to his understanding of what he was supposed to be there for. He had no interest in the financial dealings of Mr Hu, legal or illegal, or in the Chinese authorities’ strict controls on the outflow of private capital. He just wanted to do what he had been asked to do and get out of China; it was not one of his favourite places.

  ‘Trafficking people into China is illegal. Immigrati
on can be legitimately undertaken but the rules are strict. People like Mr Hu don’t generally live by the rules of the State. And people like Mr Hu don’t generally expose themselves to action by the authorities.’

  David was getting impatient, but Janice was working through her briefing in her own way and at her own pace and he realised that he was going to have to work at this pace.

  ‘All but two of the high-class women that we are aware of, who have been trafficked, have been married to wealthy individuals and have become pregnant almost immediately. There’s a shortage of women in China, particularly these educated and independently minded women, and for these it’s a seller’s market in the marriage stakes. But this, we are sure, is not the prime reason for the trafficking.’

  Once again, Janice spoke in the first-person plural without explaining who this encompassed.

  ‘Such local Chinese women as there are in this category don’t usually want to be married, let alone to be subservient to domineering husbands; they want independence and careers of their own. The new breed of successful local Chinese businessman, oligarchs, whatever you want to call them, understand this, but developing a more global vision they see opportunities and benefits in having wives with a broader Western background. Or, more to the point, they want wives with the knowledge and background to move readily between China and the West. Some of these men want to found business dynasties; others want to be rich and powerful on a less restricted stage than China. Our Mr Hu is very much one of the latter. He’s arrogant and ambitious and sees the unending Communist hegemony as too entrenched to change in his lifetime.’

  Janice’s use of the term ‘unending Communist hegemony’ amused David, but she seemed oblivious to the incongruity of her words as an official of that hegemony.