https://www.thefp.com/p/a-prisoner-of-china-an-american-scandal?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
For 11 years, Mark Swidan has languished in a Chinese prison on charges no one believes. ‘If this were a politically connected person, he would have been out a long time ago.
There are at least 54 Americans being wrongly held overseas today. They haven’t broken any laws. They haven’t received a fair hearing. They have been rendered political pawns, detained in dingy cells in places like Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China.
Last week, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich became one of them when he was taken by agents in Yekaterinburg, where he was working on a story. He was accused of espionage and taken to Lefortovo prison in Moscow. Bari Weiss
“In the fall of 2012, Mark Swidan was 37 and engaged to a Filipino woman named Mylene. Mark had met her on a trip to Manila in 2011. He loved Southeast Asia, and he’d built a small interior design business selling hand-carved knickknacks from Thailand, artworks from Vietnam—that kind of thing.
He had also just bought, with his mother Katherine Swidan, a fixer-upper outside Houston that the three of them planned to move into after the wedding. The house needed work, and Swidan googled a factory near Guangzhou that sold flooring and light fixtures for almost nothing.
So in October, Katherine said, her son jumped on a plane to buy housewares halfway across the world. This was an odd thing to do, but less so for a man who had a penchant for Asia. Katherine told me that her son also planned to visit Macau, the Las Vegas of China, which is a quick train trip away, before returning home.
He had been in Guangzhou a few weeks—Katherine wasn’t sure how long—and on his last night there, November 13, 2012, he took his driver and interpreter to dinner to thank them for carting him around.