Trump Says He Helped Free U.C.L.A. Players in China. Critics Ask, What About Activists?
William Nee, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said Ms. Liu was being punished "simply for being the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo."
Friends of Ms. Liu hoped Mr. Trump, whose administration had previously called for her freedom, would raise the issue with Mr. Xi during his Beijing visit.
Here’s a look at some of the Chinese activists whose cases experts say Mr. Trump should have raised in Beijing: After the death in July of Liu Xiaobo, the
Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was China’s most prominent democracy activist, many advocates wondered what would happen to his wife, the artist Liu Xia.
Mr. Trump’s comments intensified criticism from human rights activists, who said
that by focusing on the players from the University of California, Los Angeles, the president squandered a chance to help free Chinese dissidents, lawyers, journalists and scholars facing far harsher sentences or constraints on their freedom.
team, who were accused of stealing sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store in Hangzhou, China, probably would have been
released even if Mr. Trump had not raised the case with President Xi Jinping during a visit this month to Beijing.
20, 2017
President Trump has suggested that he saved three American college basketball players,
who had been detained in China for shoplifting, from prison terms as long as a decade.
But Mr. Trump has not said whether he did so, and the Chinese authorities have not offered any new details about her fate, adding to fears
that the government may continue to restrict her freedom.