Westerners are increasingly scared of traveling to China as threat of detention rises

ioned. Three Canadians have been sentenced to death on narcotics charges since relations between Ottawa and Beijing soured, although China denies politics affect the sentences.

Exit bans

There is another form of detention in China that often doesn't involve a jail, or even committing a crime. It comes in the form of an exit ban -- legal under the Exit and Entry Administration Law adopted in 2012 for unsettled civil cases in China.

Sometimes security officials will visit people to inform them they are subject to exit bans; other times it is not evident until a person tries to leave the country. Usually, recipients can live in their own apartments and move around their community freely -- China itself becomes a giant prison they cannot leave.

In recent years, the bans have increasingly been used on foreigners -- including on US, Australian and Canadian citizens -- who face no charges in China. A number of ethnically Chinese US citizens, in particular, have been banned from leaving China, essentially kept as "hostages" to lure their Chinese relatives living abroad to return to the country to settle business and legal disputes.

"American citizens are too often being detained as de facto hostages in business disputes or to coerce family members to return to China," said James P. McGovern, a US Democratic congressman and chairman of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

But they are not exclusively used on those of Chinese ethnicity.

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Bill Birtles and Mike Smith, two Australian journalists working in China, fled the country last September after learning exit bans had been placed on them. They sought refuge in their country's diplomatic missions in Beijing and Shanghai, while Canberra negotiated with Chinese officials to allow them to leave.

The standoff lasted five days, before the bans were lifted. The men were told they were "persons of interest in an investigation" into Cheng Lei, the Chinese-Australian anchor for state broadcaster CGTN detained earlier last year.

In February 2019, Richard O'Halloran became the first Irish citizen to be the subject of a Chinese exit ban, according to his legal team. The father-of-four had traveled to Shanghai to settle a business dispute involving fraud allegations against a shareholder in the aviation leasing firm he worked for.

Shareholder Min Jiedong was charged with defrauding Chinese investors of some $70 million.

But when O'Halloran got to the airport, he discovered he was banned from leaving China, and compelled to be a witness in Min's criminal case. During that process, O'Halloran was required to visit an immigration office every few months to have his exit ban extended, without being told why he was being prevented from leaving or what specifically was needed from him -- his lawyers said he had nothing in writing.

Min's case concluded in March 2020, and he is now in prison with no chance of appeal.

Richard O'Halloran and his family who he has been separated from for two years.

O'Halloran's exit ban was finally lifted in January. But to complete what Member of the European Parliament for Dublin, Barry Andrews, has called his "Kafkaesque nightmare," when O'Halloran went to the airport, hoping to get home for his son's 14th birthday, he was stopped again. He remains in China.

Unlike the US, Australia, the UK and Canada, Ireland has no obvious clash with the Chinese government. The Irish government's official travel advice for China now warns an "individual, their family or an employer" can be subject to an exit ban if they are connected to a legal matter or business dispute.

The US State Department issued a travel advisory last December, saying China "arbitrarily enforces local laws, including by carrying out arbitrary and wrongful detentions and through the use of exit bans on US citizens" to, among other reasons, "gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments."

Nunlist says exit bans are not uncommon in cases involving business disputes. "It is crucial that companies understand the circumstances when an exit ban may be applied, such as during a significant business dispute, as exposure can sometimes be avoided," he says.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said O'Halloran was "obliged to cooperate with the Chinese judicial authorities in recovering the assets involved" in the case involving the company he represents.

"O'Halloran has freedom of movement during his stay in China, and all legal rights are fully protected in accordance with the law," the statement added.

Financial opportunity

In 2020, China became the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment, with flows into the country rising 4% to $163 billion. With China reducing barriers to investment and being the only major global economy to grow last year, doing business there has become even more vital.

For many, rare retributions for geopolitical skirmishes, and the threat of exit bans when things go wrong, are not a serious deterrent.

One US-based analyst who regularly worked in China said she wasn't concerned about getting into the country from a political standpoint. In fact, she said her community is itching to go for research and investing purposes, once the pandemic permits travel there again. "Fund flow is still positive and strong into China," she said. "So if you're investing, it's typical to take quarterly trips."

Now Biden is in office, she is hoping for a smoother experience for American citizens than during the volatile years under former President Donald Trump.

Chinese President Xi Jinping with then US Vice President Joe Biden inside the Great Hall of the People on December 4, 2013 in Beijing, China.

James Smith, a Canadian businessman who has operated a factory in the southern city of Guangzhou for decades, said he is not deterred from operating in China, but is always mindful of the unique risks involved in working there. He asked to use a pseudonym for this piece to avoid retributions in China for his comments.

"When I'm in China, I don't go out. I don't fraternize, I don't go out to bars," he says. "You know, there's too much to lose. So my life in China is very small and I want to keep it that way. Because, you know, I've heard horror stories.

"I mean, it's a pretty scary world. I just don't want to even have any part of that."

One ethnically Chinese financial executive, who does business in China and travels on his US passport, says that while most people he encounters in the business world still want to work on the mainland, they are increasingly modifying what they share on social media and discuss with friends while outside the country to protect their safety and business opportunities. He asked not to be named for security reasons.

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In Hong Kong, where he is based, this has become a particular issue due to the national security law, which was imposed on the city by Beijing last June, and criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign powers.

"A lot of people that I knew who were quite vocal before (on political issues) on social media, I don't read anything from them anymore -- the last couple of years especially, because the political climate changed," the financial executive said.

He recalls one Buddhist colleague who had started contributing to a school in Tibet, a restive region of China with an exiled government agitating for its autonomy. He says his company took the colleague aside to ask her to refrain from donating, and to keep a low profile on Tibetan matters, to avoid causing the firm problems when she represented them in the mainland.

"It has a chilling effect," he says. "But I need to go to China to work. I'm not really concerned about my personal safety. I mean, I'm not a very influential person, in terms of the political opinions."

Those risk factors of who is influential and worth detaining might not always be obvious.

One Beijing-based business executive, for example, says he believed the risk of traveling to China to be just "non-zero," but outlines certain caveats, which might not be immediately apparent to someone living in a Western democracy. He asked not to be named for security reasons.

"I know a business guy who used to travel to China quite frequently before the pandemic. And what I've noticed on his LinkedIn feed is that he's been forwarding things from the Epoch Times," he says, referring to the media outlet affiliated with the Falun Gong religious movement banned -- and reviled -- by China's ruling Communist Party.

"So for now, he better not come. He forwards things from the Epoch Times and that's radioactive."

The situation can also change swiftly, as often illustrated during the Trump administration. Last summer, when US authorities arrested four Chinese nationals, claiming they had lied on their visa applications about their connections to the PLA, figures in Beijing say that raised the risk for any US national in China with previous ties to the US military.

"It would be fairly easy to find an equivalent person in China ... just look on their LinkedIn profile. There's lots of people that will fit that profile. So, yeah, that made people nervous," the Beijing-based executive says.

The chance to understand China is passing

When Wasserstrom, the US-China specialist, went to graduate school in the early 1980s, it was normal for authors on China to not have recently traveled to the country, which for decades had been sealed to foreigners.

"There was a whole period when the major works in the field in English were produced by people who did their research in Taiwan, or interviewed refugees or emigres in Hong Kong," Wasserstrom says. "Just as in some ways, Xi Jinping is a throwback to China being a place with a personality cult," what is occurring now in the academic space "is a kind of throwback to another time," he adds, as scholars feel less willing to travel there and are finding it harder to access sensitive sites and groups when they do make it in.

Lev Nachman, a PhD candidate at UC Irvine and visiting scholar at National Taiwan University, says undertaking research in China is now a "much more complicated goal" than it was five or six years ago.

"A lot of the new advice we are getting, as graduate students, is to do a project that does not require you to necessarily do fieldwork in China," he says, because access to archives and interviewees is difficult. "And now we just have to imagine that the difficulty has been turned up to 10, along with a risk of personal safety."

Last year, Trump issued an executive order to cancel within China and Hong Kong the Fulbright exchange program, which sends some of the brightest US minds around the world -- a particularly striking move given the first Fulbright agreement with any nation was signed in Nanjing in eastern China in 1947 -- before the Communist takeover of the mainland -- to educate Chinese students in the US.

With fewer academics willing to travel to China, and those who do make it after the coronavirus pandemic encountering a more closed nation, the result could be fewer Western minds reporting on and studying China firsthand at a time when, arguably, the world has never had a greater need to understand the country.

Wasserstrom adds that perhaps the newest wrinkle in this China story is it is no longer possible to peer into the mainland from Hong Kong, where academic study and freedom of speech has also been targeted in the past year under the national security law. Recently, Baptist University in Hong Kong canceled a photography exhibition, which featured images of the local pro-democracy demonstrations, due to "security concerns. Books by democracy figures have been removed from public libraries, now deemed illegal under the security law.

"I used to assume that if I couldn't go to the mainland, I would just go to Hong Kong more often," says Wasserstrom. "And now I feel that actually Hong Kong isn't safe, either."

News Courtesy:

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/09/china/china-travel-foreigners-arbitrary-detention-hnk-dst-intl/index.html