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US Couple's Nightmare: Held in China, Away From Daughter

Associated Press

   SHANGHAI - The first thing Daniel Hsu noticed about the room was that
   there were no sharp edges. The walls were covered with beige rubber,
   the table wrapped in soft, grey leather. White blinds covered two
   barred windows.

   Five surveillance cameras recorded his movements, and two guards kept
   constant, silent watch. They followed Hsu to the shower and stood
   beside him at the toilet.

   Lights blazed through the night. If he rolled over on his mattress,
   guards woke him and made him turn his face toward a surveillance camera
   that recorded him as he slept. He listened for sounds of other
   prisoners --a door slamming, a human voice. But he heard only the
   occasional roar of a passing train.

   "First, keep healthy," Hsu told himself. "Second, keep strong."

   He had no idea when or how he would get out.

   Hsu is a U.S. citizen. He has not been convicted of any crime in China,
   yet he was detained there for six months in solitary confinement under
   conditions that could qualify as torture under international
   conventions. Authorities from eastern Anhui province placed exit bans
   on Hsu and his wife, Jodie Chen, blocking them from returning home to
   suburban Seattle in August 2017 and effectively orphaning their
   16-year-old daughter in America.

   Critics say the Chinese Communist Party's expanding use of exit bans to
   block people -- including U.S., Australian and Canadian citizens and
   permanent residents -- from leaving China reeks of hostage-taking and
   collective punishment. They also warn that it lays bare China's will to
   exert influence, not just over Chinese citizens in China, but also
   permanent residents and citizens of other countries.

   "American citizens are too often being detained as de facto hostages in
   business disputes or to coerce family members to return to China --
   this is shocking and unacceptable behavior by the Chinese government
   and a clear violation of international law," said James P. McGovern,
   chair of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

   Hsu says Anhui authorities have been effectively holding them hostage
   in order to convince his father, Xu Weiming, to come back from the U.S.
   and face charges he embezzled 447,874 yuan (worth $63,000 today) over
   20 years ago --an allegation Xu denies.

   The COVID-19 pandemic has added grave new urgency to their desire to
   leave. Despite fear of retribution, the family is speaking out for the
   first time, offering a rare account of life inside China's opaque
   system of exit bans and secretive detention centers.

   Their story is supported by Chinese court documents and correspondence
   and interviews with U.S. and Chinese government officials. Some details
   could not be independently verified but are in line with accounts from
   other detainees.

   'Why are you not here?'

   Five days before Hsu entered the smooth beige room at a Communist
   Party-run "education center" in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province,
   his stepdaughter, Mandy Luo, boarded a flight from Shanghai to Seattle
   alone. She had been on a family visit to China and was supposed to
   return with her mother to finish high school. But airport security had
   blocked her mother from boarding.

   Mandy vomited for 10 hours on the flight home. When Luo felt bad, she
   liked to curl up on her mother's lap. But now it was just her, a barf
   bag and a snoring man next to her.

   "Mom," she kept thinking, "why are you not here?"

   The answer to that question lies in Chinese laws that give authorities
   broad discretion to block both Chinese citizens and foreign nationals
   from leaving the country. Minor children, a pregnant woman and a pastor
   --all with foreign passports --have been exit banned, according to
   people with direct knowledge of the cases.

   The U.S., Canada and Australia have issued advisories warning their
   citizens that they can be prevented from leaving China over disputes
   they may not be directly involved in. People may not realize they can't
   leave until they try to depart.

   "U.S. diplomats frequently raise the issue of exit bans and the need
   for transparency with the PRC government," a State Department
   spokesperson said in an email. "The Department has raised Mr. Hsu's
   case at the highest levels and will continue to do so until he is
   allowed to return home to the U.S."

   "The misuse of exit bans is troubling," said a spokesman for Canada's
   Foreign Minister. "Promoting and protecting human rights is an integral
   part of Canada's foreign policy."

   Australian consular cables obtained by the AP through a freedom of
   information request show that diplomats have repeatedly flagged
   concerns to Chinese counterparts about the growing number of exit bans
   on Australians.

   Within China, exit bans have been celebrated as part of a
   best-practices toolkit for convincing corrupt officials to return to
   the motherland for prosecution, part of President Xi Jinping's sweeping
   campaign to purify the ruling Communist Party and shore up its moral
   authority. Many corruption suspects fled to the U.S., Australia and
   Canada, which do not have extradition treaties with China.

   Requests for comment to Anhui Province's Commission for Discipline
   Inspection and Supervision, Public Security Department and
   procuratorate, as well as the province's foreign affairs and propaganda
   offices all went unanswered. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing
   declined to comment.

   I don't have a Ferrari

   Hsu was accused of being a co-conspirator in the corruption case
   against his father, Xu. The Hefei Intermediate People's Court found
   that Xu embezzled money for real estate in the 1990s, while serving as
   chairman of Shanghai Anhui Yu'an Industrial Corporation, a developer
   owned by the Anhui Provincial People's Government. At the time, Hsu was
   half a world away, studying accounting at the University of San
   Francisco.

   Xu denies the charges. In a letter to the court, he wrote that the
   money was a housing stipend, vetted by a government audit committee and
   awarded to dozens of employees. He said he is the target of a political
   vendetta.

   If he had really been interested in corruption, Xu added, he would have
   stolen far more than $63,000.

   "If my dad's rich, OK, I deserve this maybe," said Hsu, who ran a
   barbecue restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, which he was forced to
   sell during his involuntary exile. "But I never enjoy anything. I don't
   have a Ferrari. I don't have a yacht. I'm just a small business owner.
   I work by my hands, cutting meat."

   His interrogations came in fits and starts. He gazed at the smooth
   edges in his room and thought about hurting himself. He fantasized a
   Delta Force chopper would rescue him. The men would break through the
   walls and say, "You're free, sir. Come with us." No one came. He read
   sports magazines and the Bible.

   "Try to sit in a room for three hours and tell me how do you feel, just
   by yourself. You have nothing," he said in an interview.

   Before coming to the party education center, Hsu had spent 14 days in
   detention in Hefei, sharing a cell and one bucket toilet with two dozen
   men. Hsu asked police to send him back. At least there were other
   people, TV, chess. Even his cellmate who allegedly murdered his
   girlfriend was kind of nice.

   In mid-September police gave Hsu a phone so he could convince his
   parents to return. His mother told him they'd written letters to
   Washington. Surely, there would be justice. "Be strong," she said. "I
   am proud of you."

   Hsu's mother told him he was living in the dark. No, he argued, there
   is a window in my room: "I can sometimes see the sun and the moon."

   Now, he said, he knows what she meant. "I knew nothing else, nothing
   that happens in the world, they closed everything," he said. "She told
   me, 'In your heart there should be a light. You should keep that light
   on.'"

   After a few days, the phone was taken away. Hsu had been given a
   mission -- convince his father to return -- and he'd failed.

   Hsu was being held under "residential surveillance in a designated
   location," a legal mechanism that allows detentions of up to six months
   without formal charges or judicial review in certain cases.

   The United Nations has urged Beijing to halt the practice, saying it
   "may amount to incommunicado detention in secret places, putting
   detainees at a high risk of torture or ill-treatment."

   China is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
   Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which defines torture as
   an intentional abuse of power by the state that causes severe physical
   or mental suffering. It signed, but did not ratify, the International
   Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which precludes torture as well
   as "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

   Joshua Rosenzweig, a deputy regional director at Amnesty International
   in Hong Kong, said that though residential surveillance sounds better
   than throwing someone in jail, in practice it's one of the most
   excruciating forms of detention under Chinese law. In Hsu's case, he
   said prolonged solitary confinement and 24-hour surveillance seemed
   designed to cause psychological suffering with the aim of coercing him
   to do something.

   "That would clearly satisfy the criteria for torture and other ill
   treatment," Rosenzweig said. "The ability, inside a black box, to carry
   out this kind of coercion against someone -- it's incredible this is
   allowed to go on."

   Surviving solitude

   Hsu set a new challenge for himself: He would convince his guards, who
   had been ordered not to speak to him, to tell him their names.

   "You study me. I study you back," he said. "Who is stronger."

   Over time, and late at night, his guards relaxed. Hsu discovered one
   was a fan of Manchester United. Others wanted to know what the schools
   were like in America and how much real estate cost. Eventually, he
   said, he got one guy to bring him a caramel macchiato from Starbucks.

   In December, police announced Hsu's father had agreed to go back to
   China. Hsu was shocked. On Dec. 14, a consular officer came with news
   that his father had made a sworn statement declaring Hsu's innocence.

   His mother also sent word that her husband's health was poor and he
   would postpone his return.

   Hsu held his fists and began to shake.

   The next morning, his minders yelled at him. They made him make a
   videotaped message. Hsu told his parents they should have kept their
   word and returned. He wrote a letter, telling them he was getting sick
   in his head, pulling his hair out, not sleeping.

   The new rotation of guards refused to speak to him. He dreamed about
   his daughter and woke in the night, his face wet with tears.

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