China releases three US citizens held for years in prisoner swap

Three American citizens imprisoned for years by China have been released in a prisoner swap, the White House has said, announcing a rare diplomatic agreement with Beijing in the final months of the Biden administration.

The three are Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung, all of whom had been designated by the US government as wrongfully detained. Swidan had been facing a death sentence on drug charges while Li and Leung were imprisoned on espionage charges.

“Soon they will return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years,” the White House said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Thanks to this administration’s efforts and diplomacy with the PRC, all of the wrongfully detained Americans in the PRC are home,” the spokesperson said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

A source close to the matter said that the three were being freed in a swap with Beijing for three Chinese nationals in US custody who were not identified.

Li, a Chinese immigrant who started an export business in the US, was detained in September 2016 after flying into Shanghai. He was placed under surveillance, interrogated without a lawyer and accused of providing state secrets to the FBI. A UN working group called his 10-year prison sentence arbitrary and his family said the charges were politically motivated.

Leung was sentenced last year to life in prison on spying charges. He was detained in 2021, by the local bureau of China’s counterintelligence agency in the south-eastern city of Suzhou after China had closed its borders and imposed tight domestic travel restrictions and social controls to fight the spread of Covid-19.

Swidan was detained in late 2012 on a business trip to China on drug charges. His family and supporters say there was never any evidence he had drugs and that his driver and translator had blamed him.

In his early time in detention, Swidan was deprived of sleep and food and lost more than 100lbs (45kg), according to Dui Hua, a group that supports prisoners in China.

In September, the United States secured the release of another American considered wrongfully detained: David Lin, a pastor who had been jailed since 2006.

US officials later acknowledged that the release was part of a swap for a Chinese national. The identity of the Chinese national was not confirmed, but three days before Lin was released, the US president, Joe Biden, signed a clemency order for Wu Xiaolei, a Chinese student who had been jailed in April for stalking and harassing a Chinese pro-democracy activist in Boston.

Prisoner swaps between China and the US are rare. Recent closed-door negotiations are a quiet approach in sharp contrast to prisoner exchanges with Russia, in which Biden and Vladimir Putin personally greeted returning citizens at the airport.

Earlier this month, Biden met the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in Peru. Biden said it was “a priority to resolve the cases of American citizens who are unjustly detained or subject to exit bans in China”, according to a US readout of the conversation.

In September, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing on Americans wrongfully detained in China, something which took years of lobbying, according to Peter Humphrey, a former prisoner in China and advocate for people still detained there.

Harrison Li, the son of Kai Li, said at the hearing in September that the fact that there would be a new US president in January created a sense of urgency for Americans detained in China, because of the time it would take to reopen negotiating channels in the new administration. “The next few months before President Biden leaves office are thus a critical window for getting my dad home,” Li said.

More details soon…