Washington D.C. – The Wall Street Journal, December 07, 2024
The long battle by a Stanford student and a Uyghur activist to get attention from Washington
Harrison Li was at his apartment near Stanford University making coffee, just before Thanksgiving, when he heard his dad might be coming home.
The 27-year-old doctoral student had been trying for more than eight years to get his father, Kai Li, out of China, where he was imprisoned on espionage charges the U.S. government viewed as baseless.
Around the same time, 6,500 miles away, Chinese officials showed up at 73-year-old Ayshem Mamut’s home in Xinjiang, to transport her to Beijing.
For 20 years she hadn’t seen her son, Nury Turkel, a prominent voice in Washington against China’s treatment of its mostly Muslim ethnic Uyghur citizens in the region of Xinjiang. Stripped of her Chinese passport, she didn’t know if she would ever meet her grandchildren.
The Biden administration had spent more than a year trying to forge a deal with Beijing to let several imprisoned Americans leave China. Now it looked like a swap was coming together—and that it would include Chinese Uyghurs like Mamut as well.
The deal would only work, China had warned, if the U.S. kept it quiet. The plane hadn’t taken off yet, a State Department contact told Harrison Li, and the plan could still fall apart.
Few foreign-policy challenges have been as troubling to the U.S. as a surge in arrests of Americans by autocratic regimes. On his desk, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has kept mementos from families of Americans detained overseas; Secretary of State Antony Blinken has traveled around the world with a list of the prisoners in his breast pocket.
The administration had engineered a series of trades that brought home Americans from countries with which the U.S. has almost no relationship—Russia, but also Venezuela andIran—brushing aside criticism that the arrangements reward state-sponsored hostage-taking. But Beijing hadn’t seemed receptive to prisoner swaps. And China now held the most Americans whom Washington and rights groups viewed as targeted because of their citizenship.
The Biden administration focused on three men in particular.
Kai Li, Harrison’s father, who had sold space equipment for companies such as Boeing in China, was detained in September 2016. A decade earlier, David Lin, a pastor, had been swept up in a campaign targeting foreign missionaries and given a life sentence on a contract-fraud charge. The third American was Mark Swidan, a Texan serving an effective life sentence after being accused of running a narcotics ring.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the complex efforts to craft a deal, including detainees, their families and U.S. officials.
