A Shanghai technology executive has spent close to 1,000 days in Chinese custody after police in a rural Hunan county told him his freedom could be bought for 100 million yuan (about $14 million), collected the money, and kept him locked up anyway.
At least 64.8 million yuan of that payment was transferred into the non-tax revenue settlement account of the finance bureau in Shaoyang County, Hunan, according to disclosures published in September 2026 by Chinese investigative journalists Liu Hu and Wu Yingjiao. That account is where Chinese local governments book fines and confiscated assets as ordinary income. The criminal case against the executive, Zheng Shuai, has still not been decided.
What makes Shaoyang County different from the many complaints Chinese entrepreneurs file each year is that the bargaining was documented. Hotel surveillance footage that circulated online, together with the account Liu and Wu published on the WeChat public page "Law and Sentiment," captured officials naming a figure out loud and explaining why the county needed it.
Liu is one of China's best known investigative reporters. He and Wu were themselves placed under criminal investigation over earlier work; after an outcry among Chinese journalists and commentators, authorities released them on bail and let the case fizzle out. That bail has since expired and both are free.
A Shanghai Software Contract Became A Hunan Criminal Case
Zheng was the actual controller of Shanghai Maisi Technology Co., a software outsourcing firm registered in 2016. In 2019 it took a commission from an overseas client to build networking software with VPN functionality. The foreign company paid the development fee and ran the product afterward, according to Zheng's defense.
On January 8, 2024, officers from the Shaoyang County public security bureau detained Zheng and several colleagues at Shanghai's Hongqiao Airport and drove them overnight to Hunan, more than 1,000 kilometers away. Investigators pressed him to admit to providing programs and tools for intruding into and illegally controlling computer information systems, warning that a refusal would bring the far heavier charge of illegal business operation.
His lawyers have argued that the county never had proper jurisdiction in the first place. The servers sat in Hong Kong, the principals were in Shanghai, and Maisi was a contractor rather than the operator of the software at issue.
At Least 64.8 Million Yuan Entered A County Treasury Account
Yin Xiangfeng, then deputy magistrate of Shaoyang County and head of its public security bureau, is described as putting the offer to Zheng in person: pay 100 million yuan, and the county would arrange either a decision not to prosecute or residential surveillance at a designated location.
Deputy bureau chief Tang Zhanxiong was blunter. "Magistrate Yin has set your figure at 100 million," he said, adding that "our county really is in financial difficulty, and with this money we could solve a lot of problems." Another officer told Zheng that "your freedom is in the hands of His Honor. Only if you are willing to spend money to buy your freedom will there be a way out."
Zheng raised and paid the full amount, and in April 2024 he was released on bail pending trial. Two months later he was arrested again. His family says he was confined for months in a Shaoyang County guesthouse.
Chinese criminal procedure sets out in detail how property seized in a case must be held, transferred, and ultimately disposed of, and money is not supposed to enter government coffers before a final, effective judgment. Under Ministry of Finance rules, fines and confiscated assets are classified as government non-tax revenue. No authority has publicly identified the legal basis, the accounting vouchers, or the judicial order under which 64.8 million yuan moved into the Shaoyang County finance bureau's account. Where the rest of the money went has never been explained either.
Prosecutors Twice Told The Court The Detention Was Illegal
Yin and Tang were stripped of their posts in July 2025, and more than 10 officers connected to the case have been held accountable. Zheng has not been released.
His case reached the courts and then settled into what Chinese judges call "internal study," an open-ended holding pattern that has now run far past the statutory limit for reaching a verdict. The Shaoyang County procuratorate has twice this year issued the court a formal notice of correction of illegality over the excessive detention. As of September 2026, Zheng had been held for close to 1,000 days and no judgment had been handed down.
Beijing Banned The Practice, And Counties Kept Doing It
The phrase Chinese businesspeople use for this is "distant water fishing," borrowed from the fishing fleets that sail far from home to haul in a catch. It describes police in one province opening a case against a company based in another, widening the scope of searches, seizures, and asset freezes, or pressing a defendant to hand over a large sum in exchange for lenient treatment, with the proceeds ending up as local revenue. It spread as China's slowdown and property slump drained land sales income and left county budgets exposed.
The Supreme People's Procuratorate has said repeatedly that cross-provincial criminal cases involving companies should follow statutory jurisdiction as the rule and designated jurisdiction only as the exception, and has instructed prosecutors to examine where the alleged crime occurred, where suspects live, and how a case was opened. Where police manufacture a jurisdictional hook to capture a case, it is supposed to be corrected.
In March 2025 the procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security launched a joint campaign against irregular out-of-province enforcement, and the Private Economy Promotion Law that took effect on May 20, 2025 expressly prohibits profit-seeking enforcement across administrative boundaries. Hunan's own provincial public security department, answering a political consultative conference proposal in 2025, acknowledged that distant water fishing is "stubborn and complex," said it had banned the use of designated jurisdiction to fight over case sources, and announced a special rectification drive covering unlawful out-of-province enforcement, improper asset freezes, and the handling of seized property.
The gap between those directives and practice on the ground remains wide. Provincial political and legal affairs committees convene meeting after meeting, but at the county level the effect is difficult to detect. One reader in Hunan told Storm Media that the case has caused a considerable stir locally, and that enforcement agencies normally known for throwing their weight around have grown noticeably quieter in recent days.
Chinese internet regulators deleted the original disclosures soon after they appeared. A copy survives on the overseas Chinese-language site China Digital Times. Shaoyang County has not responded to the allegations, and neither has the prefecture-level Shaoyang municipal government above it.
For Taiwanese and other foreign companies with operations in China, the most unsettling element is not the arrest but the arithmetic. A county said out loud that it was short of money, a price was quoted for one man's freedom, and the payment was booked as government income while the man who made it stayed in a cell.
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