Lawmakers, Activists Seek to Put China on ‘No Travel’ List Over Arbitrary Detention Risks

WASHINGTON—Lawmakers and families of detained Americans in China are calling for the United States to raise its travel warning for the country to the highest level over fears of arbitrary arrests on Chinese soil.

“Nobody is safe in China—nobody,” Peter Humphrey, a former British journalist and fraud investigator who was locked up in China for nearly two years on charges of illegally gathering the personal information of Chinese nationals, told a Sept. 18 congressional hearing.

The hearing featured four Americans whose family members spent eight years or more in jail in communist China, a longstanding issue that has now garnered new attention with the release of David Lin, a China-born, naturalized American pastor who was kept in jail by the Chinese Communist Party for 18 years.