Beijing Denied 41 US Prisoners a Secret Release Date

By Roy Castellano · August 10, 2026

Forty-one US nationals were left without a release date as Beijing tied their freedom to the conduct of each convict and the improvement in Sino-American relations.

The United States spent the ninth meeting of the 1955 talks trying to find a crack in the door. According to a cable from the Chinese Foreign Ministry to Ambassador Wang Bingnan, the Americans were probing. They wanted to know how many people could be released and when the rest of the US nationals would be freed. They even suggested a private meeting to see if they could coax a secret deadline out of the Chinese.

In the world of war-planning, this is standard probing. You test the perimeter to see where the line is soft. But the instructions sent to Wang Bingnan on August 21, 1955, indicate that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had no intention of softening. The directive was blunt: "We could not make any further concessions on the issue of US nationals." Wang was told he could "speak softly," but he had to remain firm. If the Americans shifted to a threatening tone, he was told to refute them.

Conduct of Each Convict

The Chinese strategy was to move the goalposts from a collective political agreement to an individual administrative process. The Ministry instructed Wang to tell the US side that while anyone without "unfinished cases" could leave, those with civil or criminal cases were subject to a review.

This is where the leverage lived. The cable specifies that the timing of any release would depend on the "conduct of each convict and the improvement in Sino-American relations." By tying the freedom of prisoners to both individual behavior and the general diplomatic climate, Beijing ensured that the US had no fixed date to hold them to. The Ministry explicitly forbid Wang from setting a time limit in advance, calling such a request "impossible."

There was a specific calculation regarding the numbers. The US had noted that 38 nationals had left China in the previous year and questioned whether the remaining forty-one would be gone by the next. The Ministry's response was to dismiss the comparison entirely, arguing that the two time periods were not comparable unless relations improved. It was a classic stalling tactic: acknowledge the progress to keep the other side at the table, but deny the predictability that would allow the other side to plan.

Jiang Jieshi and the Students

For the negotiations to work, Beijing needed a counter-weight to the American demands. The public record establishes that after the PRC was founded in 1949, the government of the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan. This created a permanent friction point that the Ministry exploited in the cable.

Wang was told to pivot the conversation toward Chinese nationals facing restrictions when returning home. Specifically, he was to claim that the "Jiang Jieshi clique"—referring to Chiang Kai-shek—was "flagrantly threatening our students." By framing the issue as a mutual struggle for the return of citizens, the Ministry attempted to equalize the moral standing of the two sides.

When the US claimed that only about forty Chinese nationals actually wanted to leave the United States, the Ministry saw a tactical opening. They mocked the American lack of an "integrated file" on these citizens. The Ministry's logic was simple: if the US didn't have a centralized record, they couldn't possibly know the number of people wishing to return. They demanded that the US provide the documents for these individuals, shifting the burden of proof and the administrative headache back onto the Americans.

August 23

The cable also deals with the optics of the conflict. The US media had been accusing the PRC of holding US nationals as hostages. The Ministry dismissed this as a "groundless" fabrication by people in the US who were "unwilling to see the relaxation of international tension." Wang was instructed to reiterate that China had never proposed using these nationals for "an exchange purpose," while simultaneously claiming that the Chinese people were "indignant" over the plight of their own nationals in the US.

There was also the matter of "Agenda II," the broader set of general issues in Sino-American relations. The Ministry viewed this as a secondary theater, something that could be used for the "free exchange of ideas" once the primary prisoner issue was managed. They were cautious about the wording of the final announcement, telling Wang not to agree to any additions or revisions and to avoid raising the matter prematurely unless asked.

Behind the high-level diplomacy were the mundane frictions of scheduling. The cable concludes with a request for Wang to ask the US side to move the tenth meeting. The originally agreed date of August 22 was to be pushed back one day to August 23.