An appeals court in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang has suspended a death sentence handed down to a former billionaire businesswoman for fraud, following an online campaign on her behalf, official media reported.
Wu Ying, 31, was sentenced to death in 2009 by the Jinhua Intermediate People's Court in the eastern province of Zhejiang.
Now, that sentence will be suspended for two years pending a judicial review, and all of Wu's property confiscated, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Wu's appeal was rejected by the Zhejiang High Court in January, and China's highest-level appeals court, the Supreme People's Court in Beijing, announced in February that it would review her case.
According to Chinese government statistics, 99.9 percent of death sentences with a two-year reprieve do not result in executions, legal experts say.
Wu was found guilty of raising 770 million yuan (U.S. $122 million) in funds through one of China's off-the-books, illegal lending networks and of promising her investors huge returns on their investments through the then-booming property market.
The former president of Bense Holding Group was accused of "squandering" around half the amount she raised between 2005 and 2007 on luxury cars, jewellery, and real estate.
Online campaign
Chinese netizens have launched a vociferous online campaign to save Wu from execution, seeing the former hair-salon boss as the scapegoat for a system in which the corrupt political elite routinely get away with far-worse excesses at taxpayers' expense.
Her case has sparked widespread calls for the legalization and regulation of the shadowy money markets which proved her downfall.
Lawyer Zhang Xingshui said private money markets have sprung up as a way around the state monopoly on bank loans.
"They should legalise private investment and lending, but there are a lot of risks attached to doing so," Zhang said.
And Beijing-based legal scholar Teng Biao, who has been closely following Wu's case, said Teng's death sentence had been the result of a concerted campaign by officials in her home province of Zhejiang.
"Her assets were confiscated long before the sentence took effect," Teng said. "They were swallowed up and divided."
"The State Council has already said that it wants to use Wenzhou as an experiment in China's financial reforms," he said. "The financial monopoly must eventually be broken."
Wu's sentence came as China's leaders vowed to crack down on unauthorized lending networks and on rampant real estate speculation, which has put the price of residential property out of reach for many Chinese.
But the campaign to revoke Wu's death sentence spread rapidly via China's hugely popular microblogging service and included some high-profile figures, including Zhang Sizhi, the 85-year-old lawyer who defended Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing during the trial of the Gang of Four in 1976.
Zhang, who argued that Jiang was following Mao's orders at all times, said that Wu invested in hotels, advertising, wedding planning, and transport companies with money from friends and family, not the general public.
Reported by Tang Qiwei for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.