Yang Xiuzhu

Yang Xiuzhu, China's most-wanted fugitive who has been on the run for more than a decade, is set to be extradited, which observers see as a closer cooperation between China and the US in hunting fugitives.

Listed first in a wanted list of 100 economic fugitives released by Chinese authorities in April, Yang is accused of embezzling over $40 million and fled the country in 2003. She was detained after entering the US using a fake Dutch passport last year.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Lou Martinez said in an interview with China News Service on Thursday that Yang, 68, is currently detained by the US authorities and will be extradited to China.   

Yang is currently in a detention facility in New Jersey. Martinez said "As a foreign fugitive, Yang is an ICE enforcement priority."

"Yang is a significant figure in China's ongoing hunt for economic fugitives not because of the alleged amount of money she embezzled, but for the prolonged period of time she has escaped law enforcement," Li Danyang, a research fellow in public administration, also at Beihang University, told the Global Times.

Yang, a former deputy mayor of the Wenzhou city in Zhejiang province, was also the provincial deputy construction bureau chief in 2003.

Yang, who was arrested in May 2005 in the Netherlands, left the country last May after she was rejected for political asylum by Dutch authorities.

Yang entered the US by train from Canada and was caught last June after China provided the US with her passport information, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

China currently does not have extradition treaties with the US. 

Li said cooperation with Western countries in tracking fugitives was relatively lacking in the past, but recent cases like Yang's prove significant progress has been made in such cooperation between China and the US.

China in March announced that it has provided a "priority" list to the US of Chinese officials who are suspected of corruption and are believed to have fled to the US, requesting that the country extradite them back to China.