China Sentences Phan Phan-Gillis, U.S. Businesswoman, in Spying Case<br />In the indictment, the prosecutors also claimed that Ms. Phan-Gillis had tried to recruit Chinese people living<br />in the United States to work for a "foreign spy organization." Mr. Gillis said that claim was also false.<br />After a secret trial in the morning in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi region in southern China, a judge declared Ms. Phan-Gillis guilty, sentenced her and ordered her expelled from China —<br />but left unclear whether she had to serve out her prison sentence before being deported, Mr. Shang said by telephone.<br />Chinese said that engage<br />At first, Mr. Gillis said, he kept quiet about Ms. Phan-Gillis’s detention and hoped<br />that Chinese investigators would release her after realizing the charges were groundless.<br />Ms. Phan-Gillis, 57, was seized near a border crossing by Chinese security officers in March 2015, when she was accompanying a delegation of officials<br />and businesspeople from Houston, including the mayor pro tem at the time, Ed Gonzalez.<br />"They put words in my mouth," Ms. Phan-Gillis told a visiting American consular officer, according to an earlier account given by Mr. Gillis.<br />Calls to the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court, where Ms. Phan-Gillis was tried, went unanswered,<br />and there was no word of the trial in Chinese news media.
