When Jun-Ho, the son of South Korea’s World Cup football team’s main midfielder, signed with the Chinese club, he showed China ambitiously occupying the world’s most popular sport.
But after two years of detaining him, accusing him of bribery and kidnapping the game, he became another symbol: the ruthless efficiency of China’s legal system.
Mr. Son insisted that his interrogator was innocent. He asked for a lawyer, but the police told him through a Korean translator that it was unnecessary. Police threatened to bring his wife to join and asked how his children would be treated if both parents were detained.
After being detained for several months, he was granted a deal where he was promised to be punished more easily in exchange for signing a guilty offense. He accepted it.
This was a move he regretted later, saying that he only signed under coercion. “Fear surpasses me, I don’t fully understand the accusation, and I hope to return to my family,” his son told reporters at a press conference in South Korea. “This is a childish mistake.”
Mr. Sang’s arrangement was provided in China, known as “tolerance and leniency”, a legal strategy that scholars say further erode the defendant’s rights that have long been piled up in the judicial system.
Chinese courts and police responded to the Communist Party, and the conviction rate exceeded 99%. Nevertheless, the party has been trying in recent years to create a more equitable justice system, including the introduction of a “tolerance” system.
Now, the system changes how justice is implemented in China by enabling authorities to handle cases faster. Attorneys and experts say this also gives prosecutors more power to determine who was punished and lasts for how long, which also makes the system unfair.
Over the past few years, as China’s top leader Xi Jinping cracked down on corruption across society, the plea strategy has become a key tool used by prosecutors. It has been used to investigate officials, the military, financial industry, and sports in the son’s case, as well as movements to eliminate organized crime and so-called evil forces in sports.
“Forgiveness is being practiced in disturbing ways,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a former human rights lawyer in Beijing. “The threat used during the trial, sleep deprivation, no one regulates the process.”
Black box
The son’s detention in 2023 is part of a wider anti-corruption campaign in football. Many senior officials were trapped, including the former president of the Chinese Football Association, who was sentenced to life imprisonment last year for accepting bribes.
Authorities announced in September that a two-year investigation found gambling and games involving 120 games and 41 football clubs. The son is one of 43 players and Chinese officials say they will be banned from the sport for life.
Many details about the investigation have not been made public and his innocence may not be resolved immediately. But the son’s account has a glimpse of how to put individuals accused of committing crimes into the pressure to accept a plea agreement. It also gives a sense of how prosecutors use guilty pleas to establish larger cases against other suspects in this way – in this case his teammate Jin Jingdao.
The son told reporters that he believes the documents he signed (in Chinese) admit that he had received about $28,000 in payment from Mr. King. The son said the payment was not illegal, describing it as a normal financial transaction between friends.
He told reporters that his son was detained in a cell in a northeastern city, with nearly 20 people. “It feels like hell every day because I don’t know when I will be released,” he said, not allowed to return to South Korea until he signed the document last March.
Later, he learned that Mr. Jin had admitted to matching with Fixing and that the documents signed by his son would be used as evidence that he bribed a match from Mr. Jin in 2022.
Worries about coercion
When China introduced the system of tolerance in 2018, it was hailed as a major advance in fairness, which would impose “leniency” punishment for those who voluntarily confessed.
Its purpose is also to simplify the competition between the judicial system and the surge in cases in recent decades. A leniency deal can be offered to suspected criminals even before any formal charges are filed. They now account for 90% of the convictions.
But lawyers and experts say suspects are often misled as false confessions. Even the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office has recently expressed caution, saying it should be checked for signs of coercion in plea deals.
In a recent interview with Chinese media, the judge raised concerns that the courts were only conducted under the leniency of rubber stamps without having to study them carefully. Law professors question whether the quota imposed on prosecutors is incentivizing for them to quickly reach a deal.
Xi Jinping, a law professor at Anhai Normal University in central China, found 226 cases when studying this practice, among which the defendant pleaded guilty, but later the authorities later discovered a wrong and inappropriate verdict.
A powerful tool for turmoil
The plea deal is also used for railway entrepreneurs and pursue their assets, especially as the Chinese economy continues to struggle, defense lawyers said.
In the southwestern Chinese city of Mianyang, attacked by a housing economy, authorities in 2021 detained real estate developer Zeng Jianbin, as well as his employees. Local police called their gang members and asked the public to submit evidence of the crime to prove their claims.
The local government followed Mr Zeng and his company’s assets and seized acres, hundreds of apartments and dozens of cars. His company has paid a $83 million deposit for land auctioned in the city. Officials withdrew the land and auctioned it again.
Before Mr Zeng and his accomplices began the trial in May 2023, 14 employees (accountants, managers, staff and guards) admitted it. But during the trial, these confessions began to disband.
According to trial records posted online, some employees said they did not understand the allegations and just admitted it for release. Another employee was illiterate and could not read what he signed.
However, the judge accepted the plea deal and sentenced all 14 employees to jail.
These convictions then laid the foundation for the prosecutor’s case against Mr. Zeng, who was charged with leading the gang and other charges. He denied all charges, accusing prosecutors of using false confessions as evidence against him.
“This confuses right and wrong, which makes nothing,” he said. “These allegations are not actually based.”
Mr. Zeng’s wife Chen Syu shared details of her husband’s ordeal with reporters on social media. She was detained for two years for “posting false information online” and alleged money laundering, and was not released until December.
Mr. Zheng was convicted on almost all charges and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Say it out loud
Mr. South Korean football player’s son said he decided to bring up his side after the Chinese Football Association’s lifelong ban in September and handed the matter over to football management agency FIFA.
In January, FIFA told the Korean Football Association that it rejected China’s demand for a lifetime ban. A FIFA spokesman did not disclose why the organization rejected China’s demands, but it is unusual for international institutions to oppose the ruling of domestic associations in such serious charges.
Through his agent, the son refused to be interviewed. In a press conference, he said he believed there was a recording of the interrogation and that the recording would lower him.
When asked about his son, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the matter was closed because the player “pleaded guilty and received punishment.”
Haemin Kwak contributed to the research.
