But lawmakers and relatives of US citizens wrongfully detained in China say Sullivan and the State Department are pursuing a prisoner release approach that is likely to fail because it relies on quiet compromise. They urge the Biden administration to play tough at diplomacy by negotiating the release of American prisoners from Beijing through prisoner swaps or by explicitly linking their freedom to progress on key bilateral issues, including tariffs and trade.
I want you to do whatever [even] if it is necessary to exchange it for Chinese citizens that we have here,” said Katherine Swidan, mother of swidan brand, a Texan detained in China for more than nine years. “I know [Biden] can’t send in the marines… but stop trade, don’t give [China] no wiggle room on tariffs or trade until Mark is released.”
Swidan is one of three Americans jailed in China, including kai li Y david linwhom the State Department office of the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs (SPEHA) designates as “wrongly detained”. The designation authorizes Roger D. Carstens, the special envoy, to seek his release. But relatives and prisoners’ release advocates say SPEHA is hitting a wall in Beijing and that Swidan, Li and Lin are suffering from serious health problems caused by their imprisonment.
“[Carstens] and his team are working very hard [but] they’re not making any progress,” said John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation. “What I see is a growing frustration on the part of the administration at the complete failure of the Chinese to respond. [there’s] no progress in any of these cases.”
Neither Carstens’ office, the National Security Council nor the White House responded to POLITICO’s requests for comment on Sullivan’s prisoner release initiative or the number of Americans believed to be wrongfully detained in China. It is an issue that the Chinese government also wants to avoid. Yang reading of your meeting with Sullivan did not mention the initiative and the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, did not respond to a request for comment.
But the State Department acknowledges there is a problem. He adjusted his China Travel Notice in April to a level three “travel reconsideration” classification due to “arbitrary application of local laws.” And family members of unjustly imprisoned Americans and their advocates worry that Chinese authorities are intentionally targeting American citizens, turning them into geopolitical pawns.
“There are Americans in trouble in China for the main reason simply that they are Americans,” Kamm said. “This is all part of the frayed fabric of US-China relations – they are taking it out on our people.”
Swidan’s plight reflects the dangers of the Chinese judicial system. Chinese police arrested him in November 2012 for allegedly manufacturing and trafficking narcotics despite what Dui Hua has described as an absence of substantive evidence. A court in Guangdong province, after a five-and-a-half-year trial, sentenced Swidan to death with a two-year suspension in January 2020.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared Swidan a victim of arbitrary detention in February 2020. It called for his release and the right to claim “compensation and other reparations”. China has ignored the ruling.
Swidan’s mother complains that neither Sullivan nor Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, are doing enough. In recent phone calls, she said, they indicated that they are concerned about her son’s incarceration, but that they are not seeking a major policy change to secure his release. She insists it’s a failed softball diplomatic engagement strategy.
“I’m tired of [govt officials] trying to pacify me. I’m tired of ‘Yes, it’s on our radar’ [or] ‘Yes, it’s at the top of our list,’” Swidan said. “I hear a lot of rhetoric. I don’t see any results.”
The State Department insists it is working hard to get Mark Swidan home. “Ambassador Burns reached out to Ms. Swidan to listen to her concerns and assure her that seeking the release of her child is a Department priority,” a State Department spokesperson told POLITICO in a statement. “He is committed to continuing to raise his son’s case directly with senior PRC officials, as he did in his first meeting with the PRC government in April.”
Burns will visit Swidan as soon as Chinese government covid restrictions allow and is pushing for him to have access to an “independent (non-prison) doctor to assess his physical well-being,” the state spokesman said.
Harrison Li feels similar frustration. His father, Kai Li, was arrested in September 2016 by the Shanghai State Security Bureau and sentenced to a 10 years in prison in July 2018 for allegedly spying for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The UN declared Kai Li a victim of arbitrary detention in 2021 and called his imprisonment “political and not criminal… [and] at least in part attributable to his status as a foreign national of Chinese descent.”
Li said that in a recent call, Sullivan couldn’t say what he would do differently to bring his father home.
“The call was quite disappointing because I couldn’t really get any concrete promises,” Li said. “It remains to be seen if there really is any substance or we just ‘talked about this in the meeting’ because he felt he needed [and] if there really was substantive meat behind these prioritizations.”
“The State Department has no higher priority than the safety of US citizens abroad,” the State Department spokesman said. “We will continue to advocate on behalf of American citizens wrongfully detained in the PRC and work to support their families.”
Lawmakers have been demanding a better strategy to free US citizens wrongfully detained in China for years. A bipartisan group of 13 lawmakers, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), wrote to President Donald Trump in December 2020 urging his administration to be “tenacious advocates” of Americans behind bars in China. A bipartisan group of 15 lawmakers sent a joint letter to Biden in November demanding that he redouble efforts to free Kai Li.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) was the lead author of a bipartisan letter in March urging Biden to “Active participation” with Chinese President Xi Jinping to win David Lin’s freedom. And last month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a scathing letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken accusing the administration of “an unacceptable lack of urgency” in seeking Swiden’s release and demanding to know the “specific steps” taken to free him.
This congressional skepticism reflects the belief among advocates for China’s wrongfully detained that Beijing’s economic clout outweighs governments’ willingness to aggressively seek the release of their imprisoned citizens.
“I see tremendous cowardice and weakness in the behavior of Western governments towards China rooted in the fact that they want to put commercial ties and corporate interests and contracts before the interests of individual citizens who have been innocently thrown into Chinese jails,” said. peter humphrey, a former victim of arbitrary detention in China who works to free foreign nationals who are unjustly imprisoned there. “This is a perennial problem with the US government’s handling of its prisoners abroad, especially in China.”
Humphrey is helping the families of several US citizens who he says have been wrongfully imprisoned by the Chinese judicial system. They include David McMahon, a teacher jailed since 2013 on what he insists is a bogus charge of child abuse and Nelson Wells Jr., jailed since 2014 on what Humphrey says are trumped-up drug trafficking charges.
“The way to get people out is probably not just making noise. … One way the Americans could get some people back from China would be to hand over some warm bodies,” Humphrey said.
Those “hot bodies” mean prisoner swaps. SPEHA intermediated liberation of russia from US citizen Trevor Reed in April in exchange for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko. The Chinese government showed its willingness to engage in prisoner swaps in September by responding to the release of Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou from Canadian custody by releasing arbitrarily detained Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. russian media suggested last month that the United States could influence the release of basketball star Brittney Griner, jailed in Russia on drug possession charges since February, by swapping her for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
That approach resonates with Harrison Li, who says the US government’s current commitment to freeing his father is going nowhere. “A tool that has been used successfully in other countries is the prisoner trade. [and] something to that effect should be offered to the Chinese government,” Li said.
But SPEHA’s Carstens has warned that making prisoner exchanges a default method of freeing US citizens could backfire by incentivizing abuses. “My job is to start being creative. What else can we do to solve this problem without giving a direct concession?” carsten said 60 minutes of CBS on June 12. “If there’s a way to get someone out that doesn’t involve a trade, [that’s] better.”
Lin’s daughter Alice echoes Carstens’ concern. “If you give in to a terrorist’s demand, that really puts more Americans at risk because now they find out, ‘Oh, here’s an easy way to get funded, I just have to go capture more Americans,’” Alice Lin said.
But Alice Lin and other relatives of Americans wrongfully detained in China say creative approaches to freeing their loved ones are long overdue.
“The US government must take a broader view and realize that if it continues to allow the Chinese government to arbitrarily detain ordinary Americans who do not have high-level political connections or economic clout, eventually doing business in China It will be unsustainable.” Li said.
Reference-www.politico.com