Chinese police have prevented a woman from returning to her home in Florida in an effort to compel her husband to return to China, she wrote in a letter he made public.
The case appears to be the latest example of Chinese authorities placing an “exit ban” on a person’s relatives to pressure them to return.
In an appeal to authorities, Xie Fang (謝芳), 51, wrote that the police have told her that she is “innocent,” but that she cannot leave until her husband, a former bookseller who left China after his store was shut down for political reasons, gives himself up.
Photo: AP
She was barred from boarding a plane in Shanghai in August last year, her husband, Yu Miao (于淼), said, and has not been able to leave China since.
Exit bans, which critics have likened to hostage-taking, have affected both Chinese citizens and foreigners. The US government includes exit bans as a risk in its travel advisory for people going to China.
Yu declined to provide contact information for his wife, citing concerns about her safety. He did arrange for an Associated Press journalist to join a call between them in which she confirmed that she wrote the letter, but declined to comment further.
The Shanghai Public Security Bureau did not immediately respond to faxed questions on Monday and a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said she was not aware of the case.
Chinese prosecutors have previously described the practice of using exit bans on family members to pressure wanted people to return.
Prosecutors, in notes about the case of a former Chinese businessman who was accused of stealing US$6 million and had moved to Canada, wrote that they set up a special task force to “vigorously squeeze his survival” and placed exit bans on his son, daughter-in-law and ex-wife as part of a campaign to “control his relatives and shake his emotional support.”
Many countries can bar people accused of crimes or needed as witnesses to legal proceedings from leaving, but academics say China’s use of travel bans exceeds these international norms.
Yu ran one of Shanghai’s best-known independent bookstores until 2018, when local authorities prevented his Jifeng Bookstore from renewing its lease, effectively pushing it out of business.
At that time, a representative of the public security bureau told him that his shop had hosted “too many sensitive scholars” and “sensitive talks,” Yu said.
The couple moved to the US 2019, when Yu began a master’s degree in political science, and Xie came as the spouse of a student visa holder. They settled in Florida to accompany their children who go to school there. Yu is now studying journalism in Orlando and said he has not remained active in politics since going overseas.
Xie returned to Shanghai to care for her ailing mother last year, and Shanghai police told her about the ban two days before she planned to return home in August.
Xie tried to leave anyway, but airport border officials stopped her from leaving, saying she was “suspected of endangering national security,” Yu said.
Police told her a different story, she wrote in an appeal to authorities that Yu published on social media about two weeks ago.
“You clearly told me that I am innocent,” she wrote. “Once my husband returns to China for an investigation then this can be exchanged for my freedom to leave.”
Yu, who had been planning a trip to China to visit relatives and friends after his wife’s return, canceled his own plans.
The couple believes that the issue is three pseudonymous articles that the police accuse Yu of publishing from the US, about Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Russian President Vladimir Putin and those involved in China’s 1989 pro-democracy protest movement.
Yu said that he is not the author of the articles, but the police told Xie that they traced them to an IP address associated with Yu.
He said his wife can live normally inside China and spends most of her time at her Shanghai home.
The couple speak daily, using the Chinese messaging service WeChat, but separation has been hard on them.
In her letter, Xie writes that she worries about her daughters, who are applying for university this year.
“When adolescents lose their mother’s love, it will lead to lifelong regrets,” she said.
Yu said that he feels guilty that his work affected his wife, who did not work at the Jifeng Bookstore.
It feels like having an “open wound,” Yu said in a video interview from their home in Florida. “I don’t know when I will be able to hug my wife and when I will be able to go back to my hometown safely and freely.”
Over the past six months, he thought about going back to China in exchange for his wife’s freedom, but did not out of fear that his children would be left alone if the authorities banned both of them from leaving, he said.
Their twin daughters turned 18 years old this month, he added.
They also have a 22-year-old son.
Yu published his wife’s letter on WeChat without telling her in advance, he said.
It disappeared several hours after he first posted it, but attracted attention from Chinese media outlets. A similar post on his Twitter account drew nearly 170,000 views.
The next day, local police told Xie that her husband’s move would make it more difficult to resolve the situation, he said.
Feng Chongyi (馮崇義), a professor of China Studies at University of Technology Sydney who was prevented from leaving China in 2017, said that Chinese authorities regularly make such threats, but publicity through media campaigns played a key role in allowing him and others to leave after exit bans.
Yu said he decided to speak to the media because he hoped to gain the US government’s attention ahead of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip this month to China.
“It’s a very small hope, but now, I don’t have any other good hopes here,” he said.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS