The 68-year-old pastor had been incarcerated on charges of contract fraud— wrongfully, the U.S. government says (Reuters, September 16, 2024).
Last November, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged President Joe Biden to use a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to push for the release of Lin and two other detainees: Kai Li and Mark Swidan.
Washington says the three were wrongfully detained. China says such cases are handled according to law.
A congressional commission is due to hold a hearing next Wednesday on the case of American citizens imprisoned in China, in particular Lin, Li and Swidan, who it said had all faced health issues.
The real sin of Pastor Lin, shown above, seems to have been trying to set up a Christian ministry in Beijing.
Politico reports that California Governor Gavin Newsom “unsuccessfully pressed for Lin’s release when he visited China in October” of last year but that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan apparently had better luck this summer.
“The Chinese first agreed to release him in a meeting between Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken and [Chinese Foreign Minister] Wang Yi in Laos” in July in a meeting on the sidelines of an ASEAN-related ministerial meeting, said a U.S. official familiar with those discussions and granted anonymity because [the official isn’t] authorized to speak on record about sensitive diplomatic negotiations.
The timing of Lin’s release—just weeks after national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s meetings with Wang in Beijing—suggests that Sullivan also played a role in bringing Lin home.
“I know that Jake Sullivan did raise my dad’s case,” Lin’s daughter said.
Politico says that Lin was one of “three U.S. citizens that the State Department considered to be unjustly jailed in China.”
How did the State Department come up with the number three?
Prior to Lin’s release, Lin, Li, and Swidan may have been among the most severe cases of China’s unjust imprisonment of Americans. But in a February 2023 report, Newsweek pointed out that more than 200 U.S. citizens “at various stages of prosecution remain wrongfully detained in China” and subject to the whims of its “opaque criminal justice system, often with no recourse to legal assistance and little contact with home.”
Peter Humphrey, a journalist “who spent two years in a Chinese prison after being convicted on what he says were false charges of gathering illegal information,” estimates on the basis of his research that the number of currently detained or imprisoned Americans in China is more like 300, NBC News reported in April 2024.
One of China’s prisoners is Nelson Wells, Jr. According to NBC News, “The State Department has not determined Wells to be wrongfully detained….”
