Three American citizens detained in China were returned to the U.S., the White House announced on Wednesday. The move coincided with the release of four Chinese citizens detained in the U.S. The de facto prisoner swap also coincided with the U.S. government’s decision to downgrade its travel warning to China from Level Three (“reconsider travel”) to Level Two (“exercise increased caution”). Taken together, these measures are seen by some observers as attempts by both governments to score small political victories and showcase the promise of transactional politics ahead of Donald Trump’s presidency. Phelim Kine and Robbie Gramer from Politico broke the story, and described the background to the deal and the prisoners:

The release is the result of “years of work,” the official said. “President Biden brought this up when he met with President Xi in Peru two weeks ago and Jake Sullivan brought this up when he was in Beijing [in September] and Secretary Blinken also pushed for this really hard in September at UNGA with [Chinese Foreign Minister] Wang Yi,” the official added.

[…] Chinese police arrested [Mark] Swidan, a native of Texas, in November 2012 for allegedly manufacturing and trafficking narcotics despite what the San Francisco-based prisoner release nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation has described as an absence of substantive evidence. A court in Guangdong province —after a 5½-year trial—sentenced Swidan to death with a two-year reprieve in January 2020. The court upheld that sentence last year. The U.N. declared Swidan a victim of “arbitrary detention” in 2020.

[…] Shanghai police detained Kai Li of New York state in September 2016 and a court sentenced him to a 10-year prison term in July 2018 for allegedly spying for the FBI. The U.N. declared Li a victim of arbitrary detention in 2021 and described his imprisonment as “political and not criminal … [and] at least in part attributable to his status as a foreign national of Chinese heritage.” Efforts to contact Li’s son, Harrison Li, were unsuccessful

A Chinese court handed down a life sentence to [John] Leung on espionage charges in 2023, alleging he had worked for U.S. intelligence agencies since 1989, per CNN reporting. His release comes as a surprise given that neither the State Department nor the U.N. had considered him to be “wrongfully detained” by Chinese authorities. [Source]

The prisoner swap comes two months after the Chinese government released David Lin, a Chinese-American pastor who had been in detention for nearly 20 years. The U.S. government unofficially traded Lin for Xiaolei Wu, a Chinese student of Berklee College of Music who was sentenced to nine months in prison for threatening a pro-democracy activist in Boston. Shortly after Lin’s release, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing on the subject of Americans unjustly detained in China. At the South China Morning Post, Bochen Han, Kawala Xie, and Mark Magnier described who the Chinese government received in return for the three American prisoners who were released this week:

[Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning] also said on Thursday that three Chinese nationals “wrongfully imprisoned by the American side have now safely returned to the motherland” as well as one fugitive, who had long been in the United States.

[…] While the White House declined to confirm whether the US had sent anyone back in exchange, documents on the Justice Department’s website show that three Chinese citizens had been granted clemency by President Joe Biden on November 22.

A search for the three individuals – Ji Chaoqun, Shanlin Jin and Yanjun Xu – in the federal Bureau of Prisons database showed that they were no longer in custody.

[…] According to US court records, two of the three Chinese no longer in US custody – Xu and Ji – were part of an effort to gather intelligence on American companies’ advanced aerospace and satellite technology.

Xu, 44, a Chinese intelligence officer serving a 20-year sentence, was charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage, while Ji, a 33-year-old former Chicago-based graduate student in electrical engineering, was charged with acting as a foreign government agent.

Jin, 26, a former student at Texas’s Southern Methodist University, was charged with possession of child pornography. [Source]

Now that the three American citizens have returned home, the Biden administration has extracted all of the Americans that the U.S. government had formally labeled as wrongfully detained in China. Zhao Minghao, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, described the prisoner swap as a goodbye gift to Biden and an olive branch to Trump: “For China, a new playbook has already been opened ahead of Trump’s official comeback. China is doing all it can to preempt a bad start.” Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, added: “It’s a way to signal a potential for mutually beneficial transactions if you will, which potentially would appeal to somebody like Donald Trump.” Another likely component to this deal, as reported by Michele Kelemen and John Ruwitch at NPR, is that the U.S. downgraded its warning for travel to China:

On Wednesday, the State Department lowered its official travel advisory for mainland China and Hong Kong to Level 2, "Exercise increased caution." The U.S. previously recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China due to the risk of wrongful detentions and exit bans.

[…] It was not immediately clear if the change in the travel advisory was related to the prisoner release, but the new advisory for mainland China cites risks from arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including related to exit bans.

The travel advisory was also lowered for Hong Kong, but maintained at Level 3 for the city of Macau. The State Department said that was "due to a limited ability to provide emergency consular services" in the former Portuguese colony.

The Level 3 travel warning had been cited by educators as one of the reasons the number of American students studying abroad in China has remained low since Beijing lifted pandemic controls in late 2022. [Source]