The prisoner swap negotiated by the Biden administration has been in the works for months, officials said.
Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

3 Americans Are Said to Be Freed From China in Prisoner Swap

The Americans released, among others, a Chinese intelligence officer who was serving a 20-year sentence in the United States.

by · NY Times

Three Americans who were detained in China have been released in a prisoner swap with Beijing, the Biden administration said on Wednesday. One of the men had been an F.B.I. informant, according to senior U.S. officials.

John Leung, Kai Li and Mark Swidan were heading to the United States on Wednesday after months of diplomatic maneuvering to free them. Mr. Leung and Mr. Li had been held for three years and eight years. Mr. Swidan was held for more than a decade.

“Soon they will return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years,” said Sean Savett, a National Security Council spokesman. He said no other Americans are “wrongfully detained” in China, a designation that indicates that the U.S. government sees a person as the equivalent of a political hostage or that the charges are fabricated.

In return, the United States released Xu Yanjun, a Chinese intelligence officer serving a 20-year sentence after he was arrested in Brussels in 2018 and extradited to the United States in a dramatic F.B.I. operation, according to two U.S. officials.

On Wednesday, Mr. Xu was listed in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system as “not in B.O.P. custody.”

Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, said in a daily briefing on Thursday that Washington released two other Chinese nationals, and had turned over a “fugitive who had been absconding in the United States for many years.”

The State Department did not immediately respond when asked about the statement from the foreign ministry that others had been sent back to China.

The exchange has been in the works, under intense secrecy, for months. During a global summit in Peru earlier this month, President Biden discussed a potential prisoner swap with Xi Jinping, the leader of China, in a meeting at Mr. Xi’s hotel.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called the three Americans while he was flying back to Washington from a diplomatic mission to Rome, and as the three men were on their way back to the United States. Earlier this year, at meetings in New York and Vientiane, Laos, Mr. Blinken pressed his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, repeatedly on the need for China to release all wrongfully detained Americans.

Hostage diplomacy has risen in recent years, as tensions between the United States and both China and Russia have grown. Those two superpowers increasingly see detaining U.S. citizens as a way to get back spies, arms dealers and others. The American government has warned U.S. citizens to reconsider travel to those countries or to be alert there.

For Mr. Biden, the successful negotiations made for a diplomatic win as he tried to cement his legacy in the final weeks of his presidency. And it appeared to validate his strategy on China, which has been to engage in intense competition but also maintain high-level channels of communication for diplomacy on specific issues. But Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Xi is most likely trying to set the stage for relations with the incoming Trump administration.

“It’s a way to signal a potential for mutually beneficial transactions if you will, which potentially would appeal to somebody like Donald Trump,” Mr. Haass said.

Negotiations over detainees often happen independently of other policy discussions. One example is the 24-prisoner multicountry swap with Russia earlier this year, which went ahead despite tensions between Washington and Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

The latest swap was announced as the Americans were in the air, flying back to the United States on Wednesday morning.

Mr. Leung, 79, had provided information to the F.B.I. for years about Chinese activities, according to two American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the matter.

He was outwardly pro-Beijing and frequently appeared with Chinese consular officials in Houston, before the Trump administration closed the office in 2020 and said it was a hub of spying. His F.B.I. contacts discouraged him from traveling to China soon afterward, but he went anyway. Chinese authorities arrested him, and in 2023 a court in the city of Suzhou sentenced him to life in prison.

Mr. Swidan, 49, a Texas businessman, has been held since 2012 on drug-related charges, which his family has said are false.

Mr. Li, 62, was convicted by a Shanghai court in 2018 of providing state secrets to the F.B.I., according to a report from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Mr. Li’s son, Harrison Li, said his father ran a business selling technology to customers in China. In letters from prison, he had written that U.S. government agents approached him about export compliance. He said that his father believed that the Chinese government used the contact as an excuse to arrest him.

Mr. Swidan and Mr. Li had been designated by the State Department as wrongfully detained, but Mr. Leung was not, most likely because of his work for the F.B.I. The State Department did not immediately comment on the reason.

As for Mr. Xu, he is a rare instance of a trained Chinese spy caught in a complex operation and imprisoned by the Americans. His case was an embarrassment for China: He was lured from his homeland to Belgium in a sting operation by the F.B.I.

China does not typically do prisoner exchanges, but that may be changing. After Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of Huawei, the flagship Chinese telecommunications company, in 2018 at the request of the U.S. government, China arrested two Canadian men and charged them with espionage. In 2021, China freed the two men, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, just hours after the Justice Department asked Canada to release Ms. Meng following a legal deal.

Mr. Biden has now helped secure the release of more than 70 Americans that the U.S. considered wrongfully detained overseas, according to the White House.

“This is a moment of joy for the three families,” said Peter Humphrey, a British citizen who was held in China for two years on what he said were phony charges. He added that the Biden administration needed to do more for the many other Americans in prison in China, even if they are not designated as wrongfully detained and never make headlines. “None of them have had fair and impartial and transparent trials.”

Joy Dong, Keith Bradsher and Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

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