Times Employee in China to Appeal Conviction

By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
September 4, 2006

A Chinese researcher for The New York Times, sentenced to three years in prison for fraud, decided on Monday to appeal his conviction, one of his lawyers said.

Zhao Yan, 44, who worked in The Times’s Beijing bureau, won a victory on Aug. 25 when a Beijing court dismissed the more serious charge against him of leaking state secrets to the newspaper. But the court convicted him of a lesser, unrelated fraud charge that dated to 2001, when he worked as a journalist for a Chinese publication.

Mr. Zhao, who has already been in detention for nearly two years, has repeatedly denied both charges. Guan Anping, a defense lawyer, on Monday described the fraud conviction as “absurd” and said the court’s refusal to allow any defense witnesses to testify on Mr. Zhao’s behalf was “definitely a major procedural problem.”

Mr. Guan, who met with Mr. Zhao on Monday, criticized the fraud verdict as filled with “contradictions” and asserted that the court seemed “to only take a very superficial look at the facts of the case.”

Technically, Mr. Zhao’s decision to appeal to the Beijing High Court means the higher judicial body could reconsider the dismissal of the state secrets charge. But Mr. Guan said such a move was unlikely.

Mr. Zhao worked as a journalist at several Chinese publications before joining The Times in April 2004 as a researcher. He was arrested in September 2004 in connection with an article in The Times published 10 days before the arrest. That article revealed that former President Jiang Zemin had unexpectedly offered to resign his last leadership post as military chief.

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