Opinion

Harrowing tale of near death in China

Warren Rothman poses for a portrait at his home in San Francisco, CA Thursday September 20th, 2012. Rothman is a San Francisco lawyer who worked in China and was locked him up in a mental hospital -- after he was told by an associate about a Chinese official agreeing to pay a big bribe to a Chinese company. less Warren Rothman poses for a portrait at his home in San Francisco, CA Thursday September 20th, 2012. Rothman is a San Francisco lawyer who worked in China and was locked him up in a mental hospital -- after he ... more Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Harrowing tale of near death in China 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

President Obama and Mitt Romney are locked in a bitter dispute over who can be tougher on China - typical for this point in a presidential campaign.

Watching this, Warren Rothman, a San Francisco lawyer, has been reflecting on how tough China has been on him - an entirely atypical problem. While he lived and worked in Shanghai a few years ago, he says a Chinese colleague, a legal aide, carried out a complex, coordinated attempt to kill him. As he tells it, he was surreptitiously drugged, placed in a mental hospital, tortured and tormented in ways that were intended to trigger a fatal stroke.

"Why's it taking so long?" Rothman said one of his Chinese torturers mused to another one as he sat, poisoned with a prescription drug, strapped to a chair - but alive. Soon after, he managed to get away.

More recently, he has been closely following the ongoing drama in China over the murder of Neil Heywood, the British businessman whose poisoning death last fall spawned a hugely embarrassing political scandal. Heywood's death is just one of scores of similar killings in China, but his got so much attention mostly because he was a foreigner, like Rothman.

Heywood's tale prompted Rothman to look back into his own files, the ones he had saved from his own nightmare in China. There he discovered for the first time that U.S. State Department officers in the Shanghai Consulate, probably unwittingly, actually abetted the people who were trying to do him harm.

One example: As his tormenters were preparing to throw him into a mental hospital, the U.S. acting chief consul in Shanghai wrote a memo encouraging the man who was apparently trying to kill him to take charge of his care. The consul chief wrote that Rothman "is in need of urgent medical and psychiatric attention," and described the fellow Rothman believes to be behind the attempted murder scheme as "best capable to see to his immediate needs at this time, including hospital admittance." Apparently, Rothman said, without his knowledge the legal aide approached the consulate, supposedly on his behalf, to acquire documents "that would allow him to commit me to the mental hospital against my will and without my knowledge."

When Rothman recently spotted that memo, he told me he thought to himself: "Oh, my God, how can this possibly be?" So he contacted officials at the State Department Office of the Inspector General and told them of the distressing role the acting consul and other consulate officers had played in his own drama.

Well, late last month, the inspector general's office wrote back and told Rothman, "We have determined that the appropriate office to address your concerns is the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs" - the very State Department office where the diplomats in question worked.

There's an ineffectual response, if ever I have heard one.

I wrote to the agency and asked why on earth it had referred Rothman back to the office where the accused bad actors worked. Brian D. Rubendall, special agent in charge of the office, told me simply: "Our office made the decision that" the State Department bureau was "best suited to handle the complaint." That's all.

Thanks a lot. Inspectors general are supposed to hold government agencies to account for malpractice, incompetence or wrongdoing. So sending that complaint back to the department directly countervails that mandate.

The State Department Inspector General's Office itself says its mission is to "investigate instances of fraud, waste and mismanagement that may constitute either criminal wrongdoing or violation of department" rules and regulations. Helping a person who is trying to kill an American citizen certainly falls within the realm of "wrongdoing," doesn't it?

All of this started in 2008, when Rothman was based in Shanghai. He supplied e-mails, documents and other evidence that largely backed his story.

Rothman's saga may seem hard to believe - until you consider the lengths to which Chinese officials go to silence dissidents and others who threaten to discredit them. In fact, China experts agree that the government routinely flouts its own laws, and one of its favorite tactics is killing its opponents while trying to make the death seem like a suicide, accident or natural death.

This summer, for example, labor rights activist Li Wangyang was found hanging from a sheet tied to the prison bars of his hospital room window. Government officials called the death a suicide. The problem was, Li had just been released from more than 20 years in prison. He'd been perfectly healthy when first jailed, but repeated torture had left him blind and nearly deaf, prompting the widely asked question: How could he have managed to find the sheet, fashion a noose and choose a place to tie it?

In Rothman's case, one evening he was having dinner with a Chinese legal colleague who "blurted out" that he'd helped pay a $3 million bribe to ensure that his client, a prominent American company, could win a contract to work in China.

Rothman castigated the young man, a legal assistant for a Western law firm. He "looked very embarrassed," Rothman recalled. Embarrassment apparently turned into anger and a drive for protective retribution. What if Rothman told on him and got him in trouble?

That seems to have been the same reasoning Gu Kailai had in mind. She's the wife of former Communist Party princeling Bo Xilai. And in a one-day show trial last month, a Chinese court convicted her of killing Heywood, who had been moving billions of dollars in ill-gotten funds to foreign accounts for the couple.

Rothman, 68, said he had earlier confided to the legal aide that he was vulnerable to having a stroke, and he believes he was given a drug, hoping that would induce one. Then he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, a common practice in China these days.

A new report by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, notes that "China's involuntary commitment system is a black hole into which citizens can be 'disappeared' for an indefinite period of time based on the existence or mere allegation of a psycho-social disability by family members, employers, police or other state authorities." Rothman also wrote to his senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both California Democrats, and his congressional representative, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.

"Other than the fact that I did nothing corrupt, and other than the fact that I did not come back to the U.S. in an urn," he wrote, "my case bears a shocking similarity to that of Neil Heywood, the British businessman who was poisoned in Chongqing by Gu Kailai, the wife of Bo Xilai." None of them offered a meaningful response, though he did hear back from the Congressional Executive Commission on China, which said it would look into the matter. Let's just hope the committee takes the matter seriously and doesn't just punt it away, as the inspector general did.