One-third of the people listed by Interpol as China's 100 most-wanted corrupt officials and business people have returned to the country to face justice and atone for their crimes.
"I feel ashamed of what I did, stealing public funds and fleeing to Singapore to avoid jail time in China. I don't deserve to be a Chinese citizen. I realize there is no point living a miserable life in a foreign country, because the rest of my days would be a mere existence on earth."
Those words, from a confessional letter written by Li Huabo, No 2 on a list of arrest warrants for China's 100 most-wanted economic fugitives published by Interpol last year, were made public for the first time at the weekend.
Li returned to China in May last year, after serving 15 months in a Singaporean jail for depositing stolen money in bank accounts in the island state.
The 55-year-old former official at the finance bureau in Poyang county, Jiangxi province, is suspected of embezzling 94 million yuan ($14 million) in government funds. In the confession, he said he felt relieved when he agreed to return to China and turn himself in.
He is just one of 33 people on the Interpol list who have returned to China to face the music. Thanks to a global dragnet, the country's most-wanted economic fugitives are discovering that they can run, but in the end, they will be brought to justice.
According to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the nation's top anti-graft body, to date, one-third of the fugitives on the Interpol list have now returned to China, either by force or of their own volition.
Yang Xiuzhu is the latest name to be crossed off Interpol's list. Last month, Yang - who is accused of accepting bribes worth 250 million yuan and left the country in 2003 - abandoned attempts to gain political asylum in the United States, and through her lawyer, expressed a wish to return to China as soon as possible for treatment for an undisclosed medical condition.
The 70-year-old former official in the southeastern province of Zhejiang was apprehended in 2014, when US authorities charged her with entering the country illegally. Since then, she has been held at an immigration detention center in Houston, Texas.
Sun Xin, the No 1 fugitive on Interpol's list, was tried shortly after he returned in June last year. Although Sun faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment after being found guilty of embezzling 20 million yuan of public funds, he was given a lenient sentence of 14 and a half years in jail.
Crackdown intensifies
In the first half of this year, 381 other fugitives returned from 40 countries, leading to the recovery of 1.24 billion yuan in illicit assets.
In 2014, China's efforts to net overseas fugitives picked up steam, and a national coordination office was established on Oct 10 of the same year.
Led by Huang Shuxian, deputy head of the CCDI, the office comprises senior officials from eight central government bodies, including the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People's Bank of China and the country's top judicial bodies.
