On April 21, Sun Dawu, founder of the Hebei Dawu Group, was formally arrested. The authorities gave him eight charges, and it is expected that Sun Dawu may be heavily sentenced. (composite picture)
Sources said that the founder of Hebei Dawu Group, Sun Dawu, has been formally arrested. The authorities have given him eight charges, and it is expected that Sun Dawu may be heavily sentenced.
According to an April 23 report by Rights Defense Network, Sun Dawu was formally arrested on April 21 and is being held in Hebei Gaobeidian Detention Center.
According to the report, on the 22nd, the families of seven people who were previously placed under “residential surveillance” by the Hebei Dawu Group received a notice of arrest from public security.
The notice shows: Sun Dawu was charged with eight counts, including illegal absorption of public deposits, provocation, illegal mining, the crime of gathering a crowd to storm state organs, illegal occupation of agricultural land, forced trade, disrupting production and business, obstruction of public service. The legal profession predicts that Sun Dawu may be given a heavy sentence.
Others arrested include Sun Dehua, Sun Zhihua, Sun Meng, Liu Ping, Jin Fengyu and Ji Wei Lian. At this point, the main people in charge of the Dawu Group have basically all been arrested. Authorities also slapped them with new charges of illegal mining, forced trading, and fraud.
According to the report, the Da Wu case shows that there is no rule of law in mainland China under the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party has no room for entrepreneurs of conscience
Last November, Sun Dawu and 29 other group executives were taken away by police. To this day, Sun Da Wu, his wife, son and daughter-in-law, and 25 others remain in custody. The group’s 28 subsidiaries have also been officially taken over.
On April 3 of this year, two of Sun Dawu’s sister-in-laws, Yan Yuxiang and Zhou Hongyun, said on Weibo, “As daughters-in-law of the Sun family, we cannot remain silent any longer.” They introduced the progress of the case in an open letter issued on Weibo and said they had hired lawyers to intervene in the case. However, the duo’s Weibo account was subsequently blocked and relevant information was not available for viewing.
(Web screenshot)
Sun Dawu, 67, founded Dawu Group in 1985 after starting with 1,000 chickens and 50 pigs. Before his arrest, the group had more than 10,000 employees and assets of more than $10 billion. Known as China’s entrepreneur with a conscience, Sun Dawu founded free schools and money-losing hospitals to benefit the countryside.
Sun founded the Dawu Hospital located in Xushui County, Hebei Province, Lang Wuzhuang, to “patients into the door, the hospital is fully responsible for” as the purpose. It is said that patients do a full set of tests, including ultrasound, blood tests, only cost 10 yuan. The hospital has also set up a free medicine box for people with minor illnesses to receive.
A video circulated online shows Sun Dawu saying: “Because I am not short of money, I run the hospital is to let you cure people, why do you want to earn money? Earning money is a shame for the Dawu Group. Why do you want to earn money under the epidemic? I just wonder this thing, your positioning should not be to earn money ah, you run the hospital should not earn money, the best hospital, the best equipment, the best doctors, you run this hospital for me according to this purpose.”
But the Chinese Communist Party has no room for conscientious entrepreneurs like Sun Dawu. Sun has been involved in several legal battles for his criticism of the CCP system, and was warned by authorities in April 2003 for publishing articles such as “The Construction of a Well-off Society and its Difficulties” on the website of the Dawu Group.
The police claimed that the articles “seriously damaged the image of state organs” and ordered the website to be reorganized and suspended for six months.
In May of the same year, Sun Dawu was charged with illegally absorbing public deposits and sentenced to three years in prison and four years of probation. Free Asia reported that when Sun was arrested in 2003, he was given a lighter sentence after appeals from all sectors of the community, with then-President Hu Jintao and then-Premier Wen Jiabao both giving instructions to handle his case “with special caution”.
Sun Dawu’s arrest has again drawn public attention. Yang Jianli, founder of the American human rights organization Citizen Power, said that Sun Dawu is different from the “red businessmen” who collude with the government, and that he represents a social force that the Chinese Communist government cannot control.
Yang believes that the Chinese government has taken over all operations of Dawu Enterprises and is trying to define the case under the vaguely defined charge of “involvement with the police and evil” in order to create a “chilling effect” and threaten other private entrepreneurs.
Wang Ruiqin, a former CPPCC member from Qinghai province who is also a private entrepreneur and has gone into exile in the United States, said the last time she saw Sun Dawu was at an event at the Tianzhi Economic Research Institute in Beijing in 2016, when he told her, “Those who have conditions have to leave.
She asked rhetorically, “How come you didn’t leave?” Sun Dawu said he was an agricultural project, can not even root end away, he has to stick to the end.
Wang Ruiqin said that Sun Dawu is too influential in the local area, and concerned about public affairs, open-minded. However, China’s environment has changed, can not accommodate the “Sun Dawu people”.
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