July 27, 2001; Page 10A

U.S. lawyer sees 'little sense' in case of Conn. businessman being held
Attorney: I'm not sure where he is

By Steve Friess
Special for USA Today

BEIJING -- Liu Yaping, a permanent U.S. resident apprehended by authorities in China's remote Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in March, has failed to garner the same sort of attention as three other U.S.-based Chinese-American scholars convicted this month of spying for Taiwan.

Liu, 48, is a Connecticut businessman who is said to be suffering from a brain aneurysm.

Charges against Liu have shifted several times during his 5-month detention and have ranged from commercial fraud to revealing state secrets, said Jerome Cohen, his U.S. lawyer. Liu saw his Chinese lawyer only briefly in May and has been allowed no visitors, even though his parents and brother live in Inner Mongolia in northern China.

Liu emigrated to the USA in 1991, but returned frequently to do business and see his family.

"There's no sense at all that there's been any movement here," said Cohen, who also represents U.S. scholar Gao Zhan, 39. Tuesday, a Chinese court sentenced Gao and pharmaceutical executive Qin Guangguang to 10 years in prison on spy charges, but they were released today and Gao was on a plane to the USA. Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the cases Wednesday in Hanoi with his Chinese counterpart.

Cohen and Liu's wife, Zhang Pei, went to Washington on Wednesday to talk about the case with the staffs of Connecticut Senators Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd and others. "We don't even know where (Liu) is located anymore," Cohen said.

Cohen said Liu's case has failed to grab media attention because it initially did not involve espionage charges. Other observers said it lacks the drama of Gao's case.

When the American University professor was detained, Chinese authorities also held onto her 5-year-old son, Andrew. The boy, a U.S. citizen, was kept from his parents for a month before being deported with Gao's husband. "Because there was a little boy involved and because Sino-American relations were not doing well at the time, the media picked up on (Gao's case)," said David Zweig, professor of Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "There are a lot of people who are sitting in jail in China, but the central (Chinese) government doesn't act on many of them because their profiles don't get raised."

With Powell arriving in Beijing this weekend for a fence-mending visit, cases such as Liu's may be pushed lower on the agenda. "It's hard for the U.S. government to stop contact with the Chinese just because of these cases," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China. In the cases of detainees who have not gotten much media attention, he said, "the United States government is not going to put as much pressure on Chinese."

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