This earlier post noted the paradigm shift in favor of creditors that has occurred recently with the amendments to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, but that shift is nothing in comparison to the pressure that creditors in China can apparently bring to bear upon struggling debtors.
Get a load of this First Circuit Court of Appeals decision involving an appeal of a lower court decision denying a young Chinese woman’s request to remain in the U.S.:
Petitioner grew up in a small village in southeastern China. In 1998, her father partnered with Su Fei Pan, a local Communist Party boss, to start a new business. After an employee embezzled the business’s proceeds, the venture failed and petitioner’s father was left unable to pay off his outstanding loans.
Su Fei Pan, however, brokered a deal to clear the father’s debts. A wealthy Taiwanese man would pay off the debts if petitioner’s father would permit the man to marry his daughter, petitioner’s older sister. Petitioner’s father agreed, but the sister, who was 19 years younger than the Taiwanese man, refused and ran away from home.
A month later, in September 1999, Su Fei Pan attempted to broker the same deal but with petitioner taking the place of her older sister. Su Fei Pan told petitioner that her older sister was waiting for her in a hotel in the city of Fuzhou (a two hour drive from her village). When petitioner entered the hotel room, she was grabbed by an older man, presumably the Taiwanese man, who then tried to force her down onto the bed. Petitioner resisted and was able to escape. She fled from the hotel and went into hiding.
After hiding from her father, the Communist Party official and the Taiwanese man for several years in China, the young girl eventually made her way to the U.S. in 2002 with a fake visa, where she was promptly arrested at the LA airport and placed into custody for another few years. Inasmuch as she does not belong to a particular social group (“unmarried young wom[en] from rural China . . . who have resisted being forced into marriages and sexual relationships by a person in power” apparently isn’t good enough), the First Circuit affirmed the Immigration Board’s ruling and sent the young woman packing to China, where presumably the Communist Party is still providing brokerage services for her marital future.
Sort of makes you wonder what collection strategy the Communist Party would have taken had the father not had any daughters? Hat tip to Appellate Law & Practice for the link to the First Circuit decision.
In case you are wondering why the government is opposed to this young woman, recall that Prescott Bush, is the Chairman (retired) of US-China Chamber of Commerce. http://www.usccc.org/Current/mem-b.htm
More likely than not, a Bush family trust is one of the creditors.
What a depressing post. So is it the case that political asylum only extends to those who are prosecuted for political reasons?
Prescott Bush died in 1972.
Although I do not specialize in immigration law, it is my understanding that the standards for political asylum are even more difficult to establish than those of a particular social group that is subject to abuse in the home country. Yes, a very sad situation.