You are doing business in China. You cannot be dissuaded from doing so by the point that it is bad to abet a totalitarian regime that routinely oppresses and murders people. What about the growing risk of being arbitrarily imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party? Is this a consideration worth mulling?
Ian Stones was a British business executive who had worked in China since the 1970s. He was an executive for General Motors and Pfizer before establishing his own consulting firm.
“Then,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “He Vanished” (January 25, 2024). In 2018, “he disappeared from public view.”
The previously unreported case suggests more foreign business people may be held without public knowledge….
The quiet detention of a foreign businessman who is well known within China’s business community underscores the risks of operating in the country, which has an opaque legal system that is controlled by the ruling Communist Party.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal that Stones had been sentenced to five years in prison for illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties. The ministry said he appealed his conviction but the appeal was rejected in September last year.
Informed of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s response, Stones’s daughter, Laura Stones, said neither the family nor British embassy staff had been permitted to see any of the legal documents related to the case, and therefore she couldn’t comment on the details.
“There has been no confession to the alleged crime, however my father has stoically accepted and respects that under Chinese law he must serve out the remainder of his sentence,” she said.
The fact that Stones’s detention was kept quiet for so long suggests that there may be many other cases of foreign businessmen being secretly detained in China, the authors suggest.
Undoubtedly on bogus charges in each case. It’s almost 100% certain that the legal documents that Stones’s family members are not permitted to see do nothing to prove that Stones was “illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties.” StopTheChinazis.org has not seen the documents either. If Stones really was a spy trying to undermine the Chinese government, he is to be commended. But the chances are low.
China says that there’s no appreciable risk that foreign businessmen who are just going about their business in China will get into trouble with the law (which is not even true in freer, Western countries). According to a recent statement by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “So long as the relevant enterprises and individuals adhere to Chinese laws and regulations, then there’s little to worry about.”
I don’t doubt that the Chinese Communist Party was annoyed by something or other Stones did or didn’t do that could somehow be called a violation of Chinese law and “national security,” a term whose scope and snagging power the CCP is constantly expanding.
If you are doing business in China and you want to avoid the fate of Ian J. Stones, do yourself a favor. Get out.
