Leniency trap: Coercive efficiency of China’s plea system

Joy Dong & Daisuke Wakabayashi

When South Korean midfielder Son Jun-ho signed with a Chinese club, he was an indication of China’s ambition to dominate the sport. But after Chinese police officers detained him two years later for alleged bribery and match-fixing, he became a symbol of a different sort: the ruthless efficiency of China’s legal system.

Son had insisted that he was innocent. He asked for a lawyer, but police told him, through a Korean translator, that one was unnecessary. 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,” Son told reporters at a news conference in South Korea, fighting back tears.

The arrangement 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%. 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 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.

Son’s account provided a glimpse into how individuals 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.

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 Jin. Son said there was nothing illegal, describing it as a normal financial transaction between friends.

It was only after he signed that document last March, he said, that he was allowed to return to South Korea.

He later learned that Jin had confessed to match fixing and that the document Son had signed would be used as proof he had received a bribe from Jin to throw a game in 2022. Jin was later also banned for life.

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 formal charges are filed. They now account for about 90% 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.

Son 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. It is unusual for the international body to go against the ruling of a domestic association on such a serious allegation.

At the news conference, Son said he believed that an audio recording of his interrogation exists and that the recording would exonerate him. China’s foreign ministry said the matter was closed because the player had “admitted guilt and accepted punishment.”