China lets US siblings return home after 3 years

Two American siblings banned from leaving China for the last three years have been allowed to go home.

Cynthia and Victor Liu, along with their mother, were accused of “economic crimes” while on a visit to China.

They said Chinese authorities restricted them to lure their father back to face fraud charges.

The latest move coincides with the high-profile release of Chinese tech executive Meng Wanzhou and two Canadians over the weekend.

Critics have in the past accused China of using ordinary citizens as political bargaining chips, in what is known as “hostage diplomacy”. China has always denied this.

On Monday, US senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren said in a statement that Cynthia and Victor Liu were back home “after three difficult years being held in China as pawns for the Chinese government”.

They added that the siblings’ mother, Sandra Han, was also a US citizen and was “detained in China”. The senators said they were working with the US government to secure her release.

In 2018, the three of them had travelled to China to visit relatives. Ms Liu was a 27-year-old consultant and Mr Liu was a 19-year-old university student at the time.

Days later, their mother was detained by Chinese officials and taken to a “black jail”, a secretive detention centre, according to the children.

They found they could not leave China as well.

At the time China’s foreign ministries justified the restrictions saying that the three of them had documents showing they were Chinese citizens, and were “suspected of having committed economic crimes”.

But the siblings said then that Chinese authorities were using them to lure their father, a former state-owned bank executive, back to China to face criminal fraud charges, even though he had reportedly cut ties with the family in 2012.

Agencies