When Son Jun-ho, a key midfielder for South Korea’s World Cup soccer team, signed with a Chinese club, he was an indication of China’s ambition to dominate the world’s most popular sport.
But after Chinese police officers detained him two years later, accusing him of bribery and match-fixing, he became a symbol of a different sort: the ruthless efficiency of China’s legal system.
Mr. Son had insisted to his interrogators that he was innocent. He asked for a lawyer, but the police told him, through a Korean translator, that one was unnecessary. The police threatened to bring his wife in and asked how his children would fare if both parents were detained.
After months in detention, he was offered a deal in which he was promised a lighter punishment in return for signing an admission of guilt. He took it.
It was a move he would later regret, saying that he had signed only under duress. “Fear overtook me, and without fully understanding the charges, I confessed, hoping to return to my family,” Mr. Son told reporters at a news conference in South Korea, fighting back tears. “It was a naïve mistake.”
The arrangement Mr. Son was offered, known as plea leniency in China, is a legal tactic that scholars say has further eroded the rights of the accused in a judicial system that has long been stacked against them.
The courts and police in China answer to the Communist Party and the conviction rate is more than 99 percent. Still, the party has tried in recent years to create a more equitable justice system, including by introducing the “plea leniency” system.
That system has now transformed how justice is carried out in China by enabling the authorities to process cases more quickly. But it has also made the system less fair, lawyers and experts say, by giving prosecutors more power to determine who gets punished and for how long.
In the last few years, as Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has waged crackdowns on corruption across society, the plea tactic has become a critical tool used by prosecutors. It has been used in investigations into officials, the military, the financial industry, and, as in Mr. Son’s case, sports, as well as in campaigns to stamp out organized crime and so-called evil forces.
“Plea leniency is being practiced in a disturbing way,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a former human rights lawyer in Beijing who was disbarred in 2016 for “provoking trouble” for criticizing Chinese officials. “Threats used during interrogations, sleep deprivation, nobody regulates the process.”
A Black Box
Mr. Son’s detention in 2023 was part of a broader nationwide anti-corruption campaign in soccer. Many high-ranking officials have been ensnared, including the former president of the Chinese Football Association, who was sentenced to life last year for accepting bribes.
The authorities announced in September that a two-year investigation had uncovered gambling and match fixing involving 120 matches and 41 football clubs. Mr. Son was among 43 players and officials China said would be banned from the sport for life.
Many details about the investigation have not been made public, and the question of his innocence may not immediately be resolved. But Mr. Son’s account provided a glimpse into how individuals accused of crimes can be pressured into accepting plea agreements. It also gave a sense of how prosecutors use guilty pleas obtained this way to build bigger cases against other suspects — in this case, his teammate, Jin Jingdao.
Mr. Son told reporters he thought the document he had signed, which was in Chinese, was acknowledging that he had received a payment of about $28,000 from Mr. Jin. Mr. Son said that there was nothing illegal about the payment, describing it as a normal financial transaction between friends.
Mr. Son had been detained in a cell in the northeastern city of Shenyang with 20 other people for nearly a year, he told reporters. “Everyday felt like hell because I didn’t know when I’d be released.” It was only after he signed that document, in March last year, he said, that he was allowed to return to South Korea.
He later learned that Mr. Jin had confessed to match fixing and that the document Mr. Son had signed would be used as proof he had received a bribe from Mr. Jin to throw a game in 2022. Mr. Jin was later also banned for life.
Concerns About Coercion
When China introduced the plea leniency system in 2018, it was hailed as a major advancement in fairness that would allow those who admitted guilt voluntarily to be granted a “lenient” punishment.
The aim was also to streamline a judicial system grappling with a caseload that has surged over recent decades. Leniency deals can be offered to suspected offenders even before any formal charges are filed. They now account for about 90 percent of convictions.
But lawyers and experts say suspects are often misled into making false confessions. Even the top prosecutor’s office recently signaled a need for caution, saying plea deals should be examined for signs of coercion.
In recent interviews with Chinese media, judges raised concerns that the courts were merely rubber-stamping plea leniency deals without studying them closely. Law professors have questioned whether quotas imposed on prosecutors were creating incentives for them to strike deals hastily.
Xi Wei, a law professor at Anhui Normal University in central China, in researching this practice, found 226 cases in which defendants had pleaded guilty but authorities later discovered errors and inappropriate sentences.
A Powerful Tool for Shakedowns
Defense lawyers say that plea deals are also being used to railroad entrepreneurs and go after their assets, especially as China’s economy continues to struggle.
In the southwestern Chinese city of Mianyang, which has been hit by a housing downturn, the authorities in 2021 detained Zeng Jianbin, a property developer, along with his employees. Local police called them gang members and asked the public to submit evidence of crimes to prove their assertion.
The local government went after Mr. Zeng and his company’s assets, seizing acres of land, hundreds of apartments, and dozens of cars. His company had paid an $83 million deposit for a plot of land auctioned by the city. Officials took the land back and auctioned it off again.
Before the trial of Mr. Zeng and his associates started in May 2023, 14 employees — accountants, managers, staff and guards — confessed. But during the trial, those confessions started to unravel.
Some employees said they didn’t understand the charges and only confessed in the hope of being released, according to a trial transcript posted online. Another employee was illiterate and could not read what he had signed.
Yet the judge accepted the plea deals and sentenced all 14 employees to prison.
Those convictions then provided the foundation for the prosecutors’ case against Mr. Zeng, who was charged with leading a gang, among other charges. He denied all the charges, accusing prosecutors of using false confessions as evidence against him.
“This confuses right and wrong, and it makes something out of nothing,” he said, according to the transcript. “These charges are not based in fact.”
Chen Siyu, Mr. Zeng’s wife, shared details of her husband’s ordeal on social media and with reporters. She was detained for two years for “posting false information online” and on suspicion of money laundering, and was only released in December.
Mr. Zeng was found guilty on almost all charges, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Speaking Out
Mr. Son, the South Korean soccer player, said he decided to give his side of the story after the Chinese Football Association handed him the lifetime ban in September and referred the matter to soccer’s governing body, FIFA.
In January, FIFA informed South Korea’s football association that it was rejecting China’s request for a lifetime ban. A FIFA spokesman did not disclose why the organization turned down China’s request, but it is unusual for the international body to go against the ruling of a domestic association on such a serious allegation.
Through his agent, Mr. Son declined to be interviewed. At the news conference, he said he believed that an audio recording of his interrogation exists and that the recording would exonerate him.
When asked about Mr. Son, China’s foreign ministry said the matter was closed because the player had “admitted guilt and accepted punishment.”
Haemin Kwak contributed research.
