The first thing Daniel Hsu noticed about the room was that there were no sharp edges. The walls were covered with beige rubber, the table wrapped in soft, grey leather. White blinds covered two barred windows. Five surveillance cameras recorded his movements, and two guards kept constant, silent watch. They followed Hsu to the shower and stood beside him at the toilet.  Lights blazed through the night. If he rolled over on his mattress, guards woke him and made him turn his face toward a surveillance camera that recorded him as he slept. He listened for sounds of other prisoners — a door slamming, a human voice. But he heard only the occasional roar of a passing train. “First, keep healthy,” Hsu told himself. “Second, keep strong.” He had no idea when or how he would get out. Hsu is a U.S. citizen. He has not been convicted of any crime in China, yet he was detained there for six months in solitary confinement under conditions that could qualify as torture under international conventions. Authorities from eastern Anhui province placed exit bans on Hsu and his wife, Jodie Chen, blocking them from returning home to suburban Seattle in August 2017 and effectively orphaning their 16-year-old daughter in America. Critics say the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding use of exit bans to block people — including U.S., Australian and Canadian citizens and permanent residents — from leaving China reeks of hostage-taking and collective punishment. They also warn that it lays bare China’s will to exert influence, not just over Chinese citizens in China, but also permanent residents and citizens of other countries.  “American citizens are too often being detained as de facto hostages in business disputes or to coerce family members to return to China — this is shocking and unacceptable behavior by the Chinese government and a clear violation of international law,” said James P. McGovern, chair of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China.  Hsu says Anhui authorities have been effectively holding them hostage in order to convince his father, Xu Weiming, to come back from the U.S. and face charges he embezzled 447,874 yuan (worth $63,000 today) over 20 years ago —  an allegation Xu denies. The COVID-19 pandemic has added grave new urgency to their desire to leave. Despite fear of retribution, the family is speaking out for the first time, offering a rare account of life inside China’s opaque system of exit bans and secretive detention centers.  Their story is supported by Chinese court documents and correspondence and interviews with U.S. and Chinese government officials. Some details could not be independently verified but are in line with accounts from other detainees. ‘Why are you not here?’ Five days before Hsu entered the smooth beige room at a Communist Party-run “education center” in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, his stepdaughter, Mandy Luo, boarded a flight from Shanghai to Seattle alone. She had been on a family visit to China and was supposed to return with her mother to finish high school. But airport security had blocked her mother from boarding. Mandy vomited for 10 hours on the flight home. When Luo felt bad, she liked to curl up on her mother’s lap. But now it was just her, a barf bag and a snoring man next to her.  “Mom,” she kept thinking, “why are you not here?” The answer to that question lies in Chinese laws that give authorities broad discretion to block both Chinese citizens and foreign nationals from leaving the country. Minor children, a pregnant woman and a pastor — all with foreign passports — have been exit banned, according to people with direct knowledge of the cases.  The U.S., Canada and Australia have issued advisories warning their citizens that they can be prevented from leaving China over disputes they may not be directly involved in. People may not realize they can’t leave until they try to depart. “U.S. diplomats frequently raise the issue of exit bans and the need for transparency with the PRC government,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email. “The Department has raised Mr. Hsu’s case at the highest levels and will continue to do so until he is allowed to return home to the U.S.” “The misuse of exit bans is troubling,” said a spokesman for Canada’s Foreign Minister. “Promoting and protecting human rights is an integral part of Canada’s foreign policy.” Australian consular cables obtained by the AP through a freedom of information request show that diplomats have repeatedly flagged concerns to Chinese counterparts about the growing number of exit bans on Australians.  Within China, exit bans have been celebrated as part of a best-practices toolkit for convincing corrupt officials to return to the motherland for prosecution, part of President Xi Jinping’s sweeping campaign to purify the ruling Communist Party and shore up its moral authority. Many corruption suspects fled to the U.S., Australia and Canada, which do not have extradition treaties with China. Requests for comment to Anhui Province’s Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision, Public Security Department and procuratorate, as well as the province’s foreign affairs and propaganda offices all went unanswered. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing declined to comment. I don’t have a Ferrari  Hsu was accused of being a co-conspirator in the corruption case against his father, Xu. The Hefei Intermediate People’s Court found that Xu embezzled money for real estate in the 1990s, while serving as chairman of Shanghai Anhui Yu’an Industrial Corporation, a developer owned by the Anhui Provincial People’s Government. At the time, Hsu was half a world away, studying accounting at the University of San Francisco. Xu denies the charges. In a letter to the court, he wrote that the money was a housing stipend, vetted by a government audit committee and awarded to dozens of employees. He said he is the target of a political vendetta. If he had really been interested in corruption, Xu added, he would have stolen far more than $63,000.  “If my dad’s rich, OK, I deserve this maybe,” said Hsu, who ran a barbecue restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, which he was forced to sell during his involuntary exile. “But I never enjoy anything. I don’t have a Ferrari. I don’t have a yacht. I’m just a small business owner. I work by my hands, cutting meat.” His interrogations came in fits and starts. He gazed at the smooth edges in his room and thought about hurting himself. He fantasized a Delta Force chopper would rescue him. The men would break through the walls and say, “You’re free, sir. Come with us.” No one came. He read sports magazines and the Bible. “Try to sit in a room for three hours and tell me how do you feel, just by yourself. You have nothing,” he said in an interview.  Before coming to the party education center, Hsu had spent 14 days in detention in Hefei, sharing a cell and one bucket toilet with two dozen men. Hsu asked police to send him back. At least there were other people, TV, chess. Even his cellmate who allegedly murdered his girlfriend was kind of nice. In mid-September police gave Hsu a phone so he could convince his parents to return. His mother told him they’d written letters to Washington. Surely, there would be justice. “Be strong,” she said. “I am proud of you.” Hsu’s mother told him he was living in the dark. No, he argued, there is a window in my room: “I can sometimes see the sun and the moon.” Now, he said, he knows what she meant. “I knew nothing else, nothing that happens in the world, they closed everything,” he said. “She told me, ‘In your heart there should be a light. You should keep that light on.'” After a few days, the phone was taken away. Hsu had been given a mission – convince his father to return – and he’d failed. Hsu was being held under “residential surveillance in a designated location,” a legal mechanism that allows detentions of up to six months without formal charges or judicial review in certain cases. The United Nations has urged Beijing to halt the practice, saying it “may amount to incommunicado detention in secret places, putting detainees at a high risk of torture or ill-treatment.” China is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which defines torture as an intentional abuse of power by the state that causes severe physical or mental suffering. It signed, but did not ratify, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which precludes torture as well as “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Joshua Rosenzweig, a deputy regional director at Amnesty International in Hong Kong, said that though residential surveillance sounds better than throwing someone in jail, in practice it’s one of the most excruciating forms of detention under Chinese law. In Hsu’s case, he said prolonged solitary confinement and 24-hour surveillance seemed designed to cause psychological suffering with the aim of coercing him to do something. “That would clearly satisfy the criteria for torture and other ill treatment,” Rosenzweig said. “The ability, inside a black box, to carry out this kind of coercion against someone — it’s incredible this is allowed to go on.” Surviving solitude Hsu set a new challenge for himself: He would convince his guards, who had been ordered not to speak to him, to tell him their names. “You study me. I study you back,” he said. “Who is stronger.” Over time, and late at night, his guards relaxed. Hsu discovered one was a fan of Manchester United. Others wanted to know what the schools were like in America and how much real estate cost. Eventually, he said, he got one guy to bring him a caramel macchiato from Starbucks.  In December, police announced Hsu’s father had agreed to go back to China. Hsu was shocked. On Dec. 14, a consular officer came with news that his father had made a sworn statement declaring Hsu’s innocence.  His mother also sent word that her husband’s health was poor and he would postpone his return. Hsu held his fists and began to shake.  The next morning, his minders yelled at him. They made him make a videotaped message. Hsu told his parents they should have kept their word and returned. He wrote a letter, telling them he was getting sick in his head, pulling his hair out, not sleeping. The new rotation of guards refused to speak to him. He dreamed about his daughter and woke in the night, his face wet with tears. Jodie Chen, right, and her daughter, Mandy Luo, pose for a portrait in their home in Issaquah, Wash., April 13, 2020.Back in Seattle, Mandy was also struggling with solitude. Her mother’s presence had been like the air she breathed, invisible until it was gone. She missed the security of knowing someone was in the next room, just in case. She expanded her cooking repertoire beyond boiled eggs. She managed the garden, got the boiler fixed, put up her Christmas tree by herself and waded through college financial aid forms on her own, all while pulling straight A’s and helping her grandmother fire off petitions to Washington. “What I need to do gives me a lot of pressure,” she said. “I have to be a mom and then be a student at the same time.”  She didn’t want to add to the general misery, so she boxed up the rage and helplessness. Instead of shouting at her relatives, she wept in her family’s big, empty house. “Why me?” she cried out, to no one in particular. “I’m only 16. What are you expecting of me?” Who gets saved On Feb. 11, 2018, near the end of Hsu’s sixth month in detention, he was released. His wife drove nine hours to pick him up. They tossed his prison books in a dumpster and went out to dinner.  Hsu watched his wife eat. He couldn’t bring himself to hug her.  He was so sorry.  Maybe he had been alone too long.  After sleeping under blazing lights for six months, he could no longer sleep in the dark. Shanghai’s jostling crowds made him nervous. He kept crying. In Chinese tradition, he reasoned, nothing is more important than a son. The father should come back, even at pain of death, for his son. But what, then, of the son? Hsu said if his father returned to China and something bad happened, he would never forgive himself. Hsu’s mother, Qin Peiyun, insisted she and Hsu’s father would return to China only after Hsu and Chen, a U.S. green card holder, were safely back in Seattle.  “My husband and I go to China, we can’t save Daniel and Jodie,” Qin said in an interview. “If we go to China, they will destroy our whole family.” Hsu, 43, and Chen, 44, were living off savings. Their marriage was rapidly deteriorating. When they weren’t fighting, they sat at home and stared at each other.  They couldn’t say much on the phone because they figured their communications were monitored. It was a struggle to make their Americanized teenager understand how they could be stuck in China if they had done nothing wrong. Thousands of years ago, people who angered the Emperor risked having their entire family executed. But blood bonds and collective punishment were difficult for a person born in 2001 and living in Seattle to grasp.  Friends offered Hsu jobs or money to start a restaurant in Shanghai. But he always declined, worried he’d get them in trouble. He couldn’t work legally because he had a U.S. passport with an expired visa and the Anhui authorities wouldn’t give him paperwork needed to get a new one.  The U.S. Consulate in Shanghai lobbied intensively on their behalf. But nothing changed.  Hsu spent a lot of time at Starbucks. He realized that by sinking into the ruin of his life he was doing exactly what Anhui authorities wanted. The more miserable Hsu became, the more pressure it would put on his father to return. He decided to change things, starting with his marriage. “We have to show them no matter how hard the situation, we are fine, we are better somehow,” he told his wife. This might be their final chapter in China, so they should do their best to relish the country. Chen got a job. They went out with friends, ate crawfish and went to the beach at Sanya. In May 2019, immigration officers came to Hsu’s home and told him they were going to deport him because his visa had expired. They warned him he’d never be able to return to China.  “I said, ‘We can talk about that later, but deport me, please.'”  They didn’t. That same month a court notice went up outside their apartment saying the property would be auctioned. “We still need a happy life,” Hsu said. “We have to show people the positive side.” Tears were running down his face. A homecoming  In June 2019, Hsu and Chen missed their daughter’s high school graduation. In August, they recruited relatives to see her off to college. The days inched by. “Jail, I know my release date,” Hsu said. “I’m still in jail. The (expletive) China jail. And I don’t know my release date.” In early April, at the request of Anhui authorities, Chen wrote a formal petition for her exit ban to be lifted.  “I miss my daughter so much, especially at this critical moment,” she wrote. “I do hope to take care of her, side by side, to fulfill my duty as a mother.” She pledged to persuade her father-in-law to return to China, saying she would deepen her emotional bond with her in-laws to establish mutual trust, then explain the “tolerant and humanized approach” of Chinese justice. She would use her wisdom and emotional suasion to reassure them that “the party and government will be fair and impartial.”  It was unclear why Chen’s exit ban was lifted. Hsu would have to stay in China. “They told me if my dad is not coming back, I will never leave this country,” he said. Talking on FaceTime with her parents a week before her mother’s departure, Mandy, now 19, began to cry over a minor disagreement, then found she couldn’t stop. She cried so long and so deeply she could barely breathe, pouring out three years of stress and loneliness.  The morning of April 10, Chen and Hsu rode to Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport in a diplomatic sedan, a small American flag on the hood flapping in the wind. The Shanghai consul general, Sean Stein, escorted Chen to the departure gate. Chen’s trip back to Seattle took more than 24 hours. Concerned she might have picked up COVID-19 on the journey, she took an Uber from the airport to the leafy cul-de-sac they call home. Her daughter and her mother-in-law were waiting outside in the dark.  It had been 971 days since Chen had touched her daughter. “Finally, Mom’s back,” Chen said. Mandy ached to embrace her mother, but her grandmother had her by the arm, holding her back. No one knew what terrible germs Chen might be carrying. Chen had planned to self-quarantine for two weeks, but Mandy couldn’t wait. She moved from her grandparents’ house and went into quarantine with her mother. “It’s 50 percent over,” Mandy said. “My dad is the other 50 percent.” Back in Shanghai, Daniel went home from Pudong airport and slept most of the day.  When he awoke, he was alone.  
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State media and scholars in China Monday snubbed U.S. President Donald Trump after he said he would resume hiked tariffs on Chinese imports if it fails to buy an additional $200 billion more of American goods and services in the next two years as pledged.They say that such punitive measures, once re-enacted, will instead hurt the U.S. economy.But some economists urge China to take Trump’s threat seriously because the Chinese economy — already badly hit by the COVIC-19 pandemic — will be the bigger loser, and cannot afford another tariff war with the United States. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the coronavirus.Inevitable war?Economist Darson Chiu warned that the re-emergence of the U.S.-China tariff war before the U.S. presidential election in November looks inevitable, given that the possibility for China to honor its purchase commitment reached in the Phase 1 trade deal is slim.By my gauge, “(China’s) imports will have to grow 60% this year compared to 2019. This will be an impossible tall order. That means the U.S. will become China’s largest source country for imports in 2020,” said Chiu, a research fellow at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TEIR).If that happens, China will be a serious violator of the World Trade Organization’s rule of non-discrimination, which forbids any member country to discriminate between its trading partners, Chiu added.Official statistics showed that China’s imports of U.S. goods dropped to $122.7 billion in 2019 from $155.1 billion in 2018 and $154 billion in 2017.Weakened purchasing powerA worker wearing a mask against coronavirus moves gearboxes at the Kofon factory in Huanggang in central China’s Hubei province, April 13, 2020.Chiu said speculation that the coronavirus pandemic has significantly damaged China’s purchasing power is not groundless after the Chinese economy shrank 6.8% in the first quarter — its first contraction since 1987.China will have to resort to debt financing to fulfill the U.S. purchase commitment, he said.Even if China regains its purchasing power, it does not have storage space for more than $50 billion worth of U.S. energy products in the next two years now that energy prices have dropped to new lows, he said.Making matters worse, the U.S. last week tightened restrictions on much-coveted high-end tech exports to China.Under such circumstances, Chiu predicted that Trump will likely reignite the tariff war as he attempts to fuel anti-China sentiment to rally support behind his reelection campaign.New tariffs Already, Trump is toughening up against China.President Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News virtual town hall from the Lincoln Memorial, May 3, 2020, in Washington.On Friday, he threatened new tariffs as retaliatory actions over the coronavirus outbreak, saying tariffs would be the “ultimate punishment.”He told a virtual town hall Sunday from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington that China must honor its Phase 1 deal.“If they don’t buy, we will terminate the deal. Very simple,” he said.The deal ended retaliatory tariffs on some $155 billion worth of Chinese imports, which were set to take effect at the end of 2019, and halved tariffs to 7.5% on another $120 billion in Chinese goods. The U.S. still keeps the 25% import taxes on $250 billion worth of Chinese products.A snubShi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Beijing’s Renmin University, told Lianhe Zaobao, the largest Singapore-based Chinese-language newspaper, that China will retaliate if the U.S. imposes any new tariffs.That, he warned, will force the U.S. economy to slip into a bigger recession and serve as a disadvantage to Trump’s reelection bid.A commentary on Reference News, an affiliate to state media Xinhu News, argued that the U.S. is mulling three “poisonous arrows” — tariffs, stripping China of its sovereign immunity, and cancellation of U.S. debt obligations to China so that the U.S. can sue China for coronavirus damages.But all three arrows will only end up hurting the U.S. economy, it said.In an editorial, state tabloid Global Times lambasted U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, calling him an anti-China bluff, and urging him to present proof when he said there was “enormous evidence” to show the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab.As China is closed for a public holiday, its “wolf warrior” diplomats have not responded to Pompeo’s accusations.People wearing face masks walk past a bank electronic board showing the Hong Kong share index, May 5, 2020.Asian markets tumbled on Monday as U.S.-China tensions appeared to rise. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng benchmark dropped 4.2%, while South Korea’s Kospi slipped 2.9%.Speaking on condition of anonymity, an economics professor at Peking University told VOA that any new tariffs will hurt Chinese exports, which may lead to a drop in China’s foreign reserves and thus limit its purchasing power.Tensions escalateThe professor cautioned China to manage its relations with the U.S., though he doubted China will deliberately fail its purchase commitment, unless it is a political decision.Both he and TEIR’s Chiu estimate that China is likely to halve its economic target for this year to around 3% during its “Two Sessions” later this month. The term “Two Sessions” refers to meetings of the national legislature and top political advisory body.The professor said the export-oriented Chinese economy cannot possibly do too well, if the world economy keeps slipping and given that China is slowly recovering from the outbreak.Chiu expects China to boost government spending, keeping its 2020 growth target at 3%, higher than most international economic institutes’ estimates, which range between 1% and 2%. 
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The Trump administration is making ever louder pronouncements casting blame on China for the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to sidestep domestic criticism of the president’s own response, tarnish China’s global reputation and give the U.S. leverage on trade and other aspects of U.S.-China competition.  President Donald Trump has vowed to penalize China for what U.S. officials have increasingly described as a pattern of deceit that denied the world precious time to prepare for the pandemic. The opening salvo isn’t in the form of tariffs or sanctions but in a one-sided accounting of China’s behavior that could yank the Chinese lower on the global reputation meter.The State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House have all launched public efforts in recent days to lay bare what they say is clear evidence that China tried to mask the scale of the outbreak and then refused to provide critical access to U.S. and global scientists that could have saved lives. More than 250,000 people have died globally from COVID-19, including more than 68,000 in the U.S.The Trump administration, a senior administration official says, is trying to convince the world that China isn’t playing by the same rules as everyone else, and that may be the biggest punishment for an intensely proud emerging superpower. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue and spoke only on condition of anonymity.To that end, the administration has pushed its China criticism beyond the bounds of established evidence.Trump and allies repeat and express confidence in an unsubstantiated theory linking the origin of the outbreak to a possible accident at a Chinese virology laboratory. U.S. officials say they are still exploring the subject and describe the evidence as purely circumstantial. But Trump, aides say, has embraced the notion to further highlight China’s lack of transparency.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that there is “enormous evidence” that the virus began in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  The institute, which is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is about 8 miles, or 13 kilometers, from a market that is considered a possible source for the virus. It has done groundbreaking research tracing the likely origins of the SARS virus, finding new bat viruses and discovering how they could jump to people.Pompeo said China has denied the U.S. and World Health Organization access to the lab. But Trump says he has seen information that gives him a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan institute is the origin of the virus. Asked why he has such confidence, Trump said: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”FILE – An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in Wuhan, China, April 17, 2020.Health officials are dubious.  “From our perspective, this remains speculative,” WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan says of the lab theory. “But like any evidence-based organization, we would be very willing to receive any information that purports to the origin of the virus.”Trump’s ouster of more than a handful of top intelligence officials has given him an additional credibility problem when it comes to the administration’s pronouncements based on intelligence.”These purges have already, I fear, politicized the intelligence community’s work in key ways,” said Mike Morell, a former acting CIA director under President Barack Obama who now hosts the “Intelligence Matters” podcast. One of our institutions critical to the pursuit of the truth has a large crack in it.”China strongly rejects Trump’s version of events.On Monday, China’s official Global Times newspaper said Pompeo was making “groundless accusations” against Beijing by suggesting the coronavirus was released from a Chinese laboratory.  The populist tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily said the claims were a politically motivated attempt to preserve Trump’s presidency and divert attention from the U.S. administration’s own failures in dealing with the outbreak.While Trump’s and Pompeo’s critical statements have been at the forefront of the administration’s anti-China rhetoric, U.S. government agencies, including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, have been compiling often publicly available information to try to support the allegations.DHS documents, obtained by The Associated Press on Sunday and Monday, accuse the Chinese government of intentionally downplaying the scope and severity of the spread of the virus in order to buy up international stocks of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies needed to combat the disease.Although any country might be expected to purchase large quantities of materials necessary to combat a major threat to public health, the administration has sought to portray China’s actions as secret, irresponsible and dangerous for the rest of the world.One such document, drawing from open source material, emphasizes reports about the disappearance of Chinese doctors who raised early alarms about the virus and the response, the Chinese government’s alleged suppression and destruction of virus samples and closure of relevant laboratories.  It also reports on China’s early resistance to acknowledging human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, the failure of authorities to immediately block domestic or international travel out of Wuhan and China’s opposition to calls for an international inquiry into the pandemic.The focus on China comes as Trump’s own record has faced persistent scrutiny. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, told the AP on Monday that Trump was first briefed by intelligence agencies about the virus on Jan. 23, and then again on Jan. 28.Providing a rare glimpse into one of the most sensitive U.S. government practices, the highly classified presidential daily briefing, McEnany said it was only in that second briefing that Trump was told that the virus was spreading outside China.  Trump, she added, was told that all the deaths were still occurring inside China and that Beijing was not sharing key data. Days later, Trump moved to severely curtail travel to the U.S. from China. The White House’s descriptions of the briefing were prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a spokesperson said.But reference to the coronavirus was included in at least passing mention in the written version of the intelligence briefing on Jan. 11 and Jan. 14, according to a senior U.S. government official within the intelligence community, who said that other officials, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, were briefed.  Officials emphasized that much of the U.S. government’s attention during that period was on Iran, after the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qasem Soleimani in a Jan 3 U.S. drone strike and the subsequent downing of Ukrainian airliner over Tehran. 
 
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