The lede says it.
A senior executive at US risk advisory firm Kroll has been barred from leaving mainland China for the past two months, heightening concerns about the risks foreign companies face when doing business in the country.
Then this:
Michael Chan, a Hong Kong-based managing director at the company who specializes in corporate restructuring, traveled to the mainland in July and subsequently informed his employer that he cannot leave….
However, this:
Neither Chan nor Kroll is the target of the investigation….
They’re not targets, but Chan can’t leave, anyway. That’s kidnapping. That he’s free to move about the cabin country in no way means he’s not a prisoner. He’s just locked up in a gilded cage. And like most cages, his contact with the outside world is a tenuous, sometime thing, given the PRC’s communications fire wall.
In the end, the optimal way to mitigate these kidnappings by the PRC is for American businesses to stop doing business inside the PRC, especially given the Biden administration’s reserve price for getting our citizens back. It’s come to this, quite aside from the national security question of our businesses being economically and resource dependent on an enemy nation.