That was all it took to be suspected of espionage. Instead of a quick business trip, Lee, who was 47 at the time, stumbled into a four-year saga in which he was jailed and barred from leaving the country. It was at times absurd, at times traumatic and sometimes even tedious.
His story, told to The Washington Post over a series of interviews in advance of his long-awaited departure Monday from Beijing, is a rare firsthand account of how Chinese law enforcement uses coercion, threats and trickery to build a case against someone they have decided has crossed its national security “red lines.”
China regularly uses exit bans or detentions at border control for political reasons, and the ambiguity of the rules enables Beijing to apply them liberally. It has added to the number of laws regarding exit bans since 2018, according to a recent report from the rights group Safeguard Defenders.
The U.S. State Department this month urged Americans to reconsider travel to China over concerns of arbitrary detention and frequent use of exit bans. It said one of the reasons the Chinese government uses exit bans is to gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised three cases of wrongfully detained U.S. citizens when he visited Beijing last month. Among those is Kai Li, a Shanghai-born American businessman detained in 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in prison on spying charges.
In recent years, Chinese police have repeatedly targeted Taiwanese people over vague national security violations too. Yang Chih-yuan, founder of a party that promotes Taiwanese independence, was arrested in China when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island last August, while Shih Cheng-ping, a retired economics professor, was sentenced to four years in prison for espionage in 2018 but still appears to be in China.
Almost four years ago, Lee became another Taiwanese citizen accidentally running afoul of Chinese officials.
This week, Lee was finally free. On Monday, he boarded a plane from Beijing to Tokyo, where he arrived wearing a face mask printed with a Taiwanese flag. “I almost cried when I passed through immigration just now,” he said at Haneda airport in Tokyo, where he will be spending some time decompressing. “I’ll never return there.”
China’s Ministry of Public Security, the Supreme People’s Court and the Taiwan Affairs Office did not reply to requests for comment about Lee’s case, and phone calls to these departments went unanswered.
On that day in August 2019, when the Chinese border guards found the fliers in Lee’s bag, he was thoroughly searched, then shoved into a van and taken to a nearby hotel, Lee said in conversations with The Post. His version of events is impossible to verify — he was the only person there. His Chinese lawyer, who first met Lee more than four months into his detention, did not respond to requests for comment.
But Jing-Jie Chen, a Taipei-based campaigner at Safeguard Defenders, said Lee’s account is consistent with testimony from other people who have been held in China on spurious national security charges and fits a pattern of Chinese authorities using forced disappearances and the threat of more jail time to elicit “confessions.”
Two other former detainees, Taiwanese activist Lee Ming-che and Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Yu, said the broad outline of Lee’s account matched their own experiences.
Lee recounted how, over 10 weeks and hundreds of sessions, state security agents interrogated him without giving him access to a lawyer. He was cut off from the outside world, detained with only a book on quantum mechanics to read.
They put together a case centered on Lee’s handing out the fliers at the pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, which they took as evidence that Lee was inciting the protests.
The phrase he printed on the fliers — a common chant that literally translates to “add oil, Hong Kong” — had taken on new meaning over the summer of 2019, when it was shouted by hundreds of thousands who turned out to protest a law allowing extradition to mainland China.
Those fliers would later feature on Chinese state television as evidence to support espionage charges against Lee, who was labeled a “Taiwan independence spy,” and a videoed “confession.”
That “confession,” which featured in a Chinese state television show on “spies” from Taiwan, came about when two unfamiliar people arrived and said they needed a short video for “the leaders in Beijing” and it would determine the length of Lee’s sentence.
Lee wasn’t handed a script, but officers repeatedly interrupted angrily when they didn’t like his answers. They threatened to charge him with secession, meaning 10 or more years in prison, if he was uncooperative. He got the sense that admitting guilt would mean a lighter sentence.
Video testimony like the kind Lee gave should not be considered reliable, said Chen, because when you are “not able to communicate with your lawyers or the outside world, you will basically confess to anything the police ask you to.”
The agents also went through the contents of Lee’s mobile phone and laptop in painstaking detail. Casual conversations with friends were dissected for political meaning. Anything related to the Hong Kong protests was printed out and carefully circled. They seized on videos he took from the window of a Shenzhen hotel restaurant showing soldiers amassing near the border with Hong Kong.
Another focus was his graduate studies two decades earlier. They discovered that he had attended events in New York run by a group that supported Taiwan’s formal independence. He only went three times, mostly to socialize, he said. In later Chinese state media reports, this became ironclad proof of his “secessionist” leanings.
Eventually, Lee was charged with “illegally supplying state secrets overseas.” He strenuously denied all accusations, saying they were absurd, verging on nonsensical. A close Chinese friend of Lee’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, agreed that the charges against him were “ridiculous.”
As they got closer to a court date, even Lee’s Chinese lawyer balked at the idea of entering a not-guilty plea. In a case of this profile, accepting guilt was the only option, he said.
He was indeed found guilty — like 99.9 percent of people who go before the Chinese courts — and was sentenced to 22 months in prison.
To this day, Lee doesn’t get how a snapshot taken from a busy public space could amount to a state secret.
His best guess is that he was, from China’s perspective, a useful “scapegoat” chosen by chance. At the time, China’s leaders were scrambling for a response to the outpouring of anger in Hong Kong. They were determined to lay the blame on outsider interference, specifically from the United States and Taiwan.
“It was too risky to arrest an American citizen, so they targeted me. A Taiwanese with an American degree,” said Lee, who has an MBA from Long Island University in New York.
Lee completed his sentence at a prison in the southern city of Guangzhou in July 2021. He went to Shanghai to board a flight to Taipei. Again, he made it only as far as border control.
As well as giving him jail time, the court had stripped him of political rights for an additional two years, effectively barring him from leaving China. That meant he spent the same sentence again living in a surreal kind of limbo, which presented another challenge for Lee.
For starters, he needed money. Savings and transfers from family only went so far. Unsure of how people would respond to a call from a convicted spy, he discreetly contacted old connections in China to see if they would be willing to restart business dealings. Only some were.
At first, out of caution, he did little. But after a while, as coronavirus restrictions eased, he began to wonder if the Chinese authorities had forgotten him.
For 10 months he was left alone, living out of a suitcase, staying with friends or in hotels across the country. For hours, sometimes days, he forgot his predicament.
Traveling became his therapy. He couldn’t leave China, so he traveled all around China. In a search for answers about “why this had to happen,” Lee turned to Chinese human rights activists, meeting more than 100 of them secretly.
Over time, Lee became almost philosophical about his ordeal. He now jokes he attended a four-year course at the “Chinese University of Human Rights.” When back in Taiwan, he plans to write a book about his ordeal. He calls it his “graduation thesis.”
