China Releases 3 Detained Americans In Rare Prisoner Swap

In what could be an effort of China to make nice with Trump before he returns to the Oval Office (or at least aiming to slightly improve relations during the final days of Biden), the Chinese government has released three American citizens from prison who were deemed by Washington as wrongfully detained. 

The White House confirmed on Wednesday that the three – Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung – are returning home. All of them had already served years in detention. “Soon they will return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years,” the Biden White House said in a statement.

Li and Leung had both been accused of espionage, while Swidan was convicted on drug charges and faced a possible death sentence.

Politico is reporting that it was the result of a prisoner swap for unidentified Chinese citizens in US custody. An unnamed admin official said it was part of “years of work” by US diplomats and the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs.

“President Biden brought this up when he met with President Xi in Peru two weeks ago and Jake Sullivan brought this up when he was in Beijing [in September] and Secretary Blinken also pushed for this really hard in September at UNGA with [Chinese Foreign Minister] Wang Yi,” the official described.

Li had immigrated from China, after which he founded an export company, but upon visiting Shanghai in 2016 he was detained by Chinese police, having been accused of giving state secrets to the FBI. He received a ten-year long prison sentence.

Leung had been sentence to life in prison after authorities accused him of having worked for US intelligence since 1989. As for Swidan, reports offer the following details: 

Chinese police arrested Swidan, a native of Texas, in November 2012 for allegedly manufacturing and trafficking narcotics despite what the San Francisco-based prisoner release nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation has described as an absence of substantive evidence. A court in Guangdong province —after a 5½-year trial—sentenced Swidan to death with a two-year reprieve in January 2020. The court upheld that sentence last year. The U.N. declared Swidan a victim of “arbitrary detention” in 2020.

US officials hope that this rare swap with China will pave the way for negotiations toward further releases of Americans in Chinese custody.

Mark Swidan spent over a decade in Chinese prison…

Both countries routinely spy on the other, and people in positions from academia to technology to engineering sometimes come under suspicion of espionage by either side. Stealing trade secrets and sensitive technology has been a pattern in recent years, especially by the Chinese side.