When Chinese law-enforcement officials detain a visitor, his family faces excruciating decisions. This is especially true when the detainee is either a foreigner who used to be a Chinese citizen or a Chinese residing abroad. If the case involves 'state secrets', it is more complex.
The hardest decisions concern publicity. Should the case be made public? When? The wife of Rio Tinto mining company executive Stern Hu, a naturalised Australian detained in China since July - initially on suspicion of stealing 'state secrets' - was spared this dilemma. His detention was immediately reported by journalists focused on Sino-Australian iron ore negotiations.
The wife of naturalised American petroleum geologist Feng Xue wasn't so lucky. Until the Associated Press revealed her husband's detention last week, Nan Kang, also a naturalised American, had been agonising for two years over whether to go public. Her instincts told her to handle the problem 'the Chinese way', trying to quietly mobilise assistance for her husband's release from the United States government, a Beijing lawyer and whatever connections she could muster. Until recently, her husband's former employer, the US company IHS Energy, ignored its responsibility for the case.
Kang worried that going public might worsen her husband's plight by angering Chinese officials and might even harm the couple's parents, who still live in China. Going public would also mean telling her young children that their father, a respected University of Chicago PhD, was being investigated on criminal charges - 'secretly gathering intelligence and state secrets,' that is, oil data, and 'providing it to a foreign organisation', his employer.
Kang could not discuss her worries with her husband. China prohibits family visits with detained suspects. Fortunately, once Beijing belatedly complied with its obligation to give notice of his detention under the US-PRC Consular Convention, American embassy consuls began to make monthly visits to Xue in accordance with the convention.
Xue saw things differently from his wife. Certain of his innocence and angered by the torture to which his interrogators had subjected him, he showed consular officials cigarette burns on his arms and authorised them to contact the media. Yet the embassy, which has otherwise sought to protect Xue against vague charges enveloped in almost total secrecy, was reluctant to override the understandable concerns of his wife.
In June, however, following a human rights lecture that I gave to embassy personnel, I was asked to discuss the case with his wife. She had already been advised to go public by Xue's former mentor and co-author, University of Chicago professor David Rowley. My view was similar. Recently, after inconclusive trial hearings, John Kamm, the dynamic American human rights advocate, was informed of the case. Satisfied that Xue had been tortured and convinced that Xue wanted his ordeal made known, Kamm urged the news agency AP to investigate.
