China's Prisoners for hire

[n2doc]

It’s pretty clear that Bo Xilai, a former rising star of China’s Communist Party, will receive a hefty prison term when he is sentenced next week. After all, he was convicted of taking bribes worth more than 21 million yuan ($3.4 million), embezzling 5 million yuan of public money and trying to cover up the murder of a British businessman at the hands of his wife, Gu Kalai.

What’s unclear is whether Bo Xilai himself will actually do the time.

In China, they’re called ti-shen, or body doubles—people the rich and powerful hire to serve their sentences for them. In Bo’s case, suspicions are so strong that many users of Chinese social media outlet Weibo have demanded to see a photo of him in jail to verify he is actually there and not some destitute prisoner for hire.

Even before Bo’s conviction, chatter about ti-shen grew so rampant that the Chinese government banned the term from the country’s search engines and social media outlets in August 2012.

The case that brought the alleged practice to public attention occurred in the coastal city of Hangzhou in 2009. A wealthy 20-year-old named Hu Bin was racing a customized Mitsubishi sports car through an intersection when he ran over and killed a man, then kept driving. He was sentenced to only three years in prison, which observers of the tragedy found infuriating enough. But the anger intensified when Hu appeared much heavier at his sentencing than in photos at the scene of the accident two months earlier. No one actually proved that another man had taken his place, but then again, chinese prison authorities never bothered to show it wasn’t true.

As Bo awaits his sentence, rumors are also rampant about his glamorous wife, who was charged with the murder of Neil Heywood and given a “suspended death sentence” in one of modern China’s most sensational public scandals that has drawn as much scrutiny abroad as it has domestically. Gu Kalai will serve a 14-year sentence in prison, unless she commits another crime in the next two years—in which case, she would be executed.

more

http://www.vocativ.com/09-2013/chinas-prisoners-for-hire-is-that-you-bo-xilai/

[The Magistrate]

1. Nothing New, Sir

I have seen complaints from a county magistrate in the middle Ming that persons sentenced to floggings for tax evasion were hiring substitutes to take the beating, and have no reason to suspect it was not already then an old practice.

[onehandle]

2. I really wished we would have isolated them like we did with Russia.

"Only Nixon could go to China... and create a modern world power with a medieval mindset"

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. Not even our own prsion labor can catch a break.