Three freed as US agrees to prisoner swap with China

The United States has agreed to a prisoner swap with China to secure the release of three Americans held in prison there for years, including one who had been sentenced to death.

US President Joe Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting during the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders' week in Woodside, California. China has freed three Americans considered wrongfully detained in a swap with the United States. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP

The United States has agreed to a prisoner swap with China to secure the release of three Americans held in prison there for years, including one who had been sentenced to death.

Three Chinese citizens imprisoned in America will also be freed as part of the deal, which followed months of quiet diplomacy.

The three Americans freed are Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung. They had each been designated by the US government as wrongfully detained, which compelled the Biden administration to work for their release.

Swidan had been in custody for 12 years and was facing a death sentence for drug smuggling, while Li and Leung were imprisoned on espionage charges. All three denied wrongdoing.

“Soon they will return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years,” the White House said in a statement.

The identities of the Chinese nationals included in the deal are not known.

An official said the White House had raised the cases of the detained Americans with China in several meetings in recent years, including earlier this month when President Joe Biden spoke to President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Peru.

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, also raised the issue in meetings with the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in September, the White House official said.

US journalist Evan Gershkovich waves as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews after being freed by Russia. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

The freed prisoners were expected to arrive back in the US “in a few hours,” according to Politico, which first reported the agreement. They are likely to be transferred to the Brooke Army Medical Center near San Antonio in Texas, which specialises in caring for former hostages. It is where the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich received care after he was released from prison in Russia in August.

Li, 62, a Chinese immigrant who started an export business in the US, was detained in September 2016 after flying into Shanghai. He was placed under surveillance, interrogated without a lawyer and accused of providing state secrets to the FBI. The United Nations described his 10-year prison sentence as arbitrary and his family said the charges were politically motivated.

Leung was sentenced last year to life in prison on spying charges, aged 78. He was detained in 2021 by the local bureau of China’s counterintelligence agency in the eastern city of Suzhou after Beijing closed its borders and imposed tight domestic travel restrictions and social controls to fight the spread of Covid-19.

Swidan, now 49, was arrested in 2012 during a business trip to Dongguan, in Guangzhou province. He was handed a death penalty five-and-a-half years later. Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, was in China at the time to discuss the trade war between the two countries.

US-China relations have been fraught on a number of issues, including trade, human rights, Taiwan and the production of fentanyl. Incidents such as a Chinese spy balloon being shot down over the US last year have only added to tensions. Beijing claimed that the balloon was designed to monitor the weather.

Trump will return to the White House in January with a promise to impose tariffs on Chinese imports.

On Monday, he announced that he would impose a 10 per cent tariff on all Chinese imports. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington said “no one will win a trade war” and added that “China believes that China-US economic and trade co-operation is mutually beneficial in nature”.