For Americans detained in China, a return home could depend on better ties

As Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China this week, the most important issue for hundreds of families in the U.S. was when their loved ones imprisoned in the country are coming home.

HONG KONG — Nelson Wells Jr. has spent almost a decade imprisoned in China.

In May 2014, the American traveled to the country from Japan, where he lived with his wife and three children, to seek medical treatment for a head injury he had sustained in a traffic accident. He was arrested and accused of trying to smuggle drugs out of the country as he was departing China from the city of Chongqing.

Wells, now 50, was initially sentenced to life in prison, after being convicted without an opportunity to tell his side of the story and with little evidence of his guilt, his family says on its website. In 2019 his sentence was reduced to a fixed term of 22 years, not counting time he had already served.

In brief phone conversations, his family gets glimpses of his deteriorating health: high blood pressure, dramatic weight loss, mental health issues and seizures that they believe are related to his accident.

“He’s hanging on by a thread,” Wells’s mother, Cynthia Wells, 69, told NBC News in a Zoom interview last week from the family’s home in Louisiana.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/americans-detained-china-return-home-better-ties-rcna148906

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