American family held by China in ‘exit ban’
‘Hostage’ situation spurred by father’s fraud involvement
WASHINGTON — When Victor and Cynthia Liu landed with their mother on a tropical Chinese island in June to visit an ailing grandfather, they thought they would soon be on a plane back to their East Coast lives — he to start his sophomore year at Georgetown University and she to work at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New York.
Instead, within days, police officers detained their mother, Sandra Han, who, like her children, is a U.S. citizen. They moved her to a secret site, commonly known as a black jail. The children discovered at the airport that they could not leave China, even though police had said they were not being investigated or charged with a crime, the children told U.S. officials and family associates.
By holding the family hostage, they said, police are trying to force the siblings’ father to return to China to face criminal charges. The father, Liu Changming, a former executive at a state-owned bank, is accused of being a central player in a $1.4 billion fraud case.
The children say their father severed ties with the family in 2012, but Chinese authorities have still held them for months under a practice known as an exit ban — a growing tactic that has become the latest flash point in the increasingly rancorous relationship between the United States and China.
More problems to juggle
Senior U.S. diplomats, already contending with tensions over trade and territorial disputes, have denounced the way China uses exit bans as coercive, opaque and a violation of rights. In January, the State Department issued a travel warning, saying the practice posed risks to foreigners in China. Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized the bans during a visit to China, and this month he mentioned the Liu family to a top Chinese foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, at a meeting in Washington.
The siblings have pleaded their case to U.S. officials, including John Bolton, the national security adviser. “The investigative officers have made abundantly clear that neither my brother nor I am under any form of investigation,” Cynthia Liu, 27, wrote to Bolton in an August letter obtained by the New York Times. “We are being held here as a crude form of human collateral to induce someone with whom I have no contact to return to China for reasons with which I am entirely unfamiliar.”
She made similar points in an email sent in recent days to a family associate, saying that “the Chinese authorities have been consistent that neither Victor nor I are accused of or suspected of any criminal activity,” and that authorities have repeatedly said that “the reason we are here is exclusively to lure” their father.
On Friday, in response to questions from the Times, a State Department spokesman, Robert Palladino, said the United States would continue expressing concern about exit bans “until we see a transparent and fair process.”
Rare instance
The Chinese Foreign Ministry defended the holding of the three family members, saying: “The people you mentioned all own legal and valid identity documents as Chinese citizens. Because they are suspected of economic crimes, they are restricted from exiting the country by the Chinese police in accordance with the law.”
This account of the Liu family’s plight is based on interviews with administration and congressional officials, university employees and family associates, as well as correspondence by the children to them and public records. There are currently a handful of exit-ban cases involving Americans, but this is the first one in which those with knowledge of it are making the details public.
It is also a rare instance in which one of those being held — Victor Liu, 19 — was born in the United States. More often, China imposes exit bans, which can last from days to years, on naturalized foreign citizens who were born in China. Security officers often treat them as if they were still Chinese citizens, even though China does not recognize dual nationality.
The law in China states that its nationals automatically lose their citizenship when they gain citizenship in another country. It also says that someone like Victor Liu who is born with citizenship from another nation is not a Chinese citizen, no matter the parents’ citizenship.
“We are being held here as a crude form of human collateral to induce someone with whom I have no contact to return to China for reasons with which I am entirely unfamiliar.”
Cynthia Liu