A U.S. Department of Commerce employee and U.S. citizen has been unable to leave China since mid-April and is under heavy surveillance by the Chinese government.
Chinese intelligence officers reportedly began tracking the employee, who is also a veteran, after he traveled to a region of southwest China to visit family members.
The intelligence officers reportedly interrogated him about his prior service with the U.S. military, according to a U.S. government document obtained by The New York Times.
The State Department cable, which was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, is dated May 2 and was sent to officials in Washington, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House aides on the National Security Council.
Chinese officers seized the man’s passport, credit card, cellphone and iPad while he visited Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan Province. The officers worked for the Ministry of State Security, according to the cable, which is China’s main intelligence and counterintelligence agency.
The unnamed U.S. government employee’s passport was returned on April 22, but he was told he could not leave the country. His wife remains in the U.S.
The cable provides a glimpse into the operations of the secretive Ministry of State Security as the ministry increases pressure on the American citizen during his stay in China. It also lays out efforts by U.S. diplomats to get the man to Beijing from Chengdu in early May as Chinese officers conducted surveillance on him.
The situation reportedly became public over the weekend. But the cable obtained by The Times didn’t identify the man by name or provide details about his background. It does, however, offer new information about his situation.
China’s restrictions on the man come at a precarious moment, too, as President Donald Trump wages a trade war against the global superpower at the same time as courting Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom the American president has spoken of in flattering terms as of late.
Rubio revealed during a trip to Malaysia this month that “the odds are high” that Trump and Xi will meet this year.
The Commerce Department employee isn’t the only one barred from leaving China, either — dozens of American citizens have been barred from leaving the country in a shadowy practice called an “exit ban” that the Chinese government has used for years. It targets ethnic Chinese people who were former citizens of China, usually, but also targets others, including some who have been involved in business disputes in the country.
In recent years, The Times reported that Chinese intelligence and security officials have been given greater power to scrutinize and detain foreign citizens and their Chinese associates in hunts for what they call subversive elements.
The Department of Commerce employee eventually told U.S. diplomats that the Chinese officers’ questions “focused heavily” on his U.S. military background and not his work for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is a unit in the Commerce Department. The man reportedly told Chinese officers about the entry-level job he held at a nuclear institute in China, his graduate studies in engineering at a university in Puerto Rico and then his work maintaining Black Hawk helicopters while he was a member of the U.S. Army.
His case eventually became so contentious that a senior U.S. diplomat and diplomatic security officer went to Chengdu to meet with him. The diplomat observed “heavy surveillance” around the Commerce employee when they met on May 1, according to the cable.
That diplomat had planned to accompany the man to a meeting with the Ministry of State Security that was scheduled for him that day, but it was postponed. The next day, two embassy officials and the employee took an Air China flight to Beijing, and the entire time, the employee was under Chinese surveillance.
The cable noted that a man with no luggage sat in the row in front of the American and appeared to be watching him and the embassy officials. Upon the group’s arrival in Beijing, the U.S. diplomat said he saw people taking photographs of her and the man as they sat at a restaurant next to the man’s temporary housing near the U.S. Embassy.
“He is growing more deeply concerned about his overall situation, as well as the safety and security of his Chinese relatives based in Chengdu,” the cable said, according to The Times.
The White House National Security Council referred requests for comment to the State Department, but the department had no comment about the details of the case, stating instead, “Our highest priority is the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas.”
Guo Jiakun, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, told a reporter in Beijing on Monday, “I don’t have information to provide. China is a country under rule of law and handles the entry and exit affairs in accordance with the law.”
