It seemed like a gift from heaven in a country where very little is free. When security guard Xu Ting went to an ATM in southern Guangzhou on a Friday night in the spring of 2006 and withdrew $140, he noticed that it deducted only 14 cents from his account. Over the next eight hours, he made 170 more withdrawals, pocketing upward of $24,000.
Over the next several months, he lost some of the money to a thief on a train, tried to start up a company that failed, and gambled most of the rest on thousands of lottery tickets that turned out to be losers. With little left, he got a job.
Then a routine police ID check led to his arrest.
His disappointment at how little the windfall had changed his life was nothing compared with what happened next. He was ordered imprisoned for life by a Chinese court late last year. The crime: bank robbery.
Xu’s case has attracted widespread attention in China, fanning public ire at the judiciary, the banking industry and corrupt officials who get away with far greater crimes than ordinary people who can’t catch a break.
Fearful of the growing anger over perceived injustice and China’s widening rich-poor gap, the government this month held a retrial for Xu, a rarity in a country where the state is presumed to always be right. A verdict could be announced any day.
For Xu’s father, the initial court decision suggests that China’s laws have not kept up with societal changes or common sense, a view some legal experts share.
“My son is not a bad kid, but it’s such a money society,” said Xu Cailiang, his father. “I don’t know much about the law, but I think this sentence is totally unreasonable. Ninety percent of people in China would have taken the money.”
That figure may be conservative. In an Internet survey in late December, just 7 percent of 19,437 respondents said they would stop withdrawing money and promptly report the mistake to the bank.
“We are not saints,” said an anonymous posting on popular Web site tencent.com.
Xu’s father, 50, says his son can hardly be expected to follow the sort of mores he did growing up in the 1950s. When Mao Tse-tung led the nation, most people were scrupulously honest, and society shared a common sense of purpose.
“The difference between then and today is like heaven and Earth,” he said. “Now everything depends on connections and graft. It’s a slippery slope.”
In the past decade, credit and debit card use has exploded in China with anger toward banks fanned by poor bank service.
Supporters say Xu’s bank is partly to blame for not maintaining its ATM. They also note that the bank never actually suffered a loss, because the $24,000 was refunded by the ATM manufacturer.
“The analogy in Xu’s case might be to someone finding money on the street and not turning it in,” said Wu Yichun, Xu’s lawyer. “This should be a civil, not a criminal, case.”
Others slam China’s banks for cheating their customers without penalty even as Xu receives a life sentence.
Internet postings criticize financial institutions that refuse to reimburse customers after their ATMs spit out counterfeit bills or blank “test” paper.
Others claim “ATM phobia,” fearful a machine will spit out more than expected and land them in trouble.
