China charges US woman with espionage

BEIJING: An American businesswoman held in China since March last year has been charged with spying, China’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, the latest development in a case that has added to US-China tension. Sandy Phan Gillis, from Houston, Texas, who has Chinese ancestry and is a naturalized US citizen, was arrested in March 2015 and had been held without charges since then. “Based on our understanding, Phan-Gillis, because of her suspected crimes of espionage, has been charged according to law by the relevant Chinese department,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters at a regular briefing. “China is a country ruled by law. The relevant Chinese department will handle the case strictly according to law,” she said, without elaborating. It is unclear what violations the charge covers. The government has chided the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention for saying her detention violated international human rights norms. The US State Department has urged China to resolve the case “expeditiously”. The charge comes amid heightened tension in US-China relations, dogged by issues from differences over territorial disputes in the South China Sea to the sentencing in the United States of a Chinese national for conspiracy to hack sensitive military information.