China has announced the return of four people from the United States, a day after the White House said that three US citizens imprisoned by Beijing had returned home.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday that “three Chinese citizens have returned to the motherland safe and sound”. Ning added that a fourth person who she described as a “fugitive who escaped to the US many years ago”, had also been returned to China.
The White House has said on Wednesday that three US citizens that Washington considered wrongfully detained in China had been released and had returned home.
The United States on Wednesday identified the three as Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung, who had all been imprisoned for years in China.
Swidan had faced a possible death sentence on drug charges, while Li and Leung had both been accused of espionage.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reveal the identities of the detainees who had returned to China.
“I want to stress that China firmly opposes US oppression and persecution of Chinese citizens for political purposes,” ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a news briefing.
In reference to the ‘fugitive’ who had been repatriated from the US, Ning said that “no place can be a permanent safe haven for criminals”.
The agreement comes in the final days of the Biden administration before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.
Biden has continued many aspects of the hard line that Trump took towards China during the Republican’s first term from 2017 to 2021. But while tensions have remained, particularly over strengthened US ties with allies in the Asia Pacific and support for Taiwan, the outgoing president has maintained steady relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump’s pledges to boost tariffs on China, meanwhile, have prompted warnings that ties between the two economic superpowers could soon strain.
While the White House did not confirm a report by the Politico news site that the release was part of a prisoner swap, a US official told reporters that the Biden administration had raised the cases in multiple meetings with Chinese officials over the past several years.
That included Biden’s meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru earlier this month.
Li, who had immigrated to the US from China and started an export business, had been detained in September 2016 after flying into Shanghai. He was accused of providing state secrets to the FBI.
A United Nations working group had previously called his 10-year prison sentence arbitrary and his family has claimed his detainment was politically motivated.
Leung was detained in 2021 by the local bureau of China’s counterintelligence agency in the southeastern city of Suzhou amid the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The US Department of State had categorised all three as wrongfully detained.
