When Chinese leader Xi Jinping visits Washington this week, he is expected to bring a large delegation of Chinese business executives. The message is clear: Beijing wants America to see a China of entrepreneurship, innovation and economic opportunity that rivals the United States.
Before China made him a political prisoner, my brother Ekpar Asat embodied that promise.
In his 20s, Ekpar built Bagdax, a successful Uyghur-language multimedia technology platform in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. A prominent Chinese tech journal named him a rising star. He believed that China’s opening to the world had created possibilities unimaginable to the generation before him.
In 2016, at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy, Ekpar traveled to the United
States to participate in the State Department’s premier International Visitor Leadership Program. He met with U.S. lawmakers, exchanged ideas with American institutions and was welcomed into American homes. Ekpar returned inspired by America’s institutions, its technology sector and the families who opened their homes to him.
My brother is caught between China and America
After Ekpar came home, Beijing detained him and said nothing. Nearly four years later, my family learned, through a Chinese Embassy response to a letter from U.S. lawmakers, that Ekpar had been sentenced to 15 years for "inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination." We have never seen a verdict, a trial record or any evidence.
The charge fails even by Beijing's own law, which caps that offense at 10 years and only in especially serious cases.
Nor does it fit the man. House Democrats noted in 2020 that Chinese media had portrayed Bagdax favorably, as a bridge across cultural divides.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Ekpar's detention arbitrary. Republican and Democratic senators have said he was jailed for a "fabricated crime" and condemned his "opaque sentencing without a fair trial." The State Department says it has raised his case with Beijing, and Congress has noted he was detained days after taking part in the department’s exchange program.
In May, the Senate passed a resolution urging President Donald Trump to prioritize the release of my brother and others in his dealings with Xi.
For a decade, the world has come to know Ekpar as a political prisoner. I knew him long before that label existed – as the best brother a sister could hope for. His colleagues knew a restless entrepreneur. Young people across the Uyghur homeland knew the platform he had built. Families knew him for helping children with disabilities and others in need. Prison did not make Ekpar significant. It interrupted a life in motion.
Ekpar began building Bagdax fresh out of college. While many of his classmates sought the security of conventional jobs, he wanted to build something new. My parents were skeptical. I wasn’t. Whenever Ekpar talked about Bagdax, he lit up. I persuaded them to let him choose his own path.
They eventually agreed, on one condition: They would provide no financial support. Ekpar started anyway. His apartment had bare cement walls, unfinished and unpainted – the first thing visitors noticed when they walked through the door. There was barely any furniture beyond a bed and a small kitchen. From that apartment, armed with his computer-science training, imagination and sheer persistence, he built Bagdax brick by brick.
What Beijing's pitch to Washington leaves out
That is what makes Ekpar's imprisonment more than a harrowing injustice. His story also exposes the contradiction at the heart of the economic confidence Beijing now wants to project abroad. China took a man doing precisely what governments everywhere say they want young people to do: create, innovate, build a business, serve a community, travel abroad, learn and come home.
Then it disappeared him.
When Xi comes to Washington, he will ask American businesses to have confidence in China. But Ekpar’s story exposes a contradiction in that pitch: What protection does business success offer when political power can still erase an entrepreneur’s freedom, business and future?
Beijing’s hypocrisy extends beyond trade. It promotes people-to-people exchange between the United States and China, yet Ekpar remains imprisoned after participating in a U.S. government exchange program.
Xi has long urged Chinese officials to tell China’s stories well, to present a China that is credible and appealing to the outside world. During his visit, President Trump should ask him about another China story: Ekpar’s. He should raise Ekpar’s case directly and ask for my brother's release.
For Xi, the test is just as straightforward. If Beijing wants Americans to believe that China is a country where entrepreneurs can build and prosper, and that Americans and Chinese can engage safely through the people-to-people exchanges both governments have long promoted, there is a simple way to demonstrate it.
Let one of those entrepreneurs, an alumnus of a U.S. government exchange program, walk free.
Let Ekpar come home.
Rayhan Asat is a human rights lawyer and scholar. She serves as a senior legal and policy adviser and China project lead at the Atlantic Council's Strategic Litigation Project.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: At US-China summit, Trump should ask Xi to release my brother | Opinion
