China Sentences Phan Phan-Gillis, U.S. Businesswoman, in Spying Case
In the indictment, the prosecutors also claimed that Ms. Phan-Gillis had tried to recruit Chinese people living
in the United States to work for a "foreign spy organization." Mr. Gillis said that claim was also false.
After a secret trial in the morning in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi region in southern China, a judge declared Ms. Phan-Gillis guilty, sentenced her and ordered her expelled from China —
but left unclear whether she had to serve out her prison sentence before being deported, Mr. Shang said by telephone.
Chinese said that engage
At first, Mr. Gillis said, he kept quiet about Ms. Phan-Gillis’s detention and hoped
that Chinese investigators would release her after realizing the charges were groundless.
Ms. Phan-Gillis, 57, was seized near a border crossing by Chinese security officers in March 2015, when she was accompanying a delegation of officials
and businesspeople from Houston, including the mayor pro tem at the time, Ed Gonzalez.
"They put words in my mouth," Ms. Phan-Gillis told a visiting American consular officer, according to an earlier account given by Mr. Gillis.
Calls to the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court, where Ms. Phan-Gillis was tried, went unanswered,
and there was no word of the trial in Chinese news media.