China frees employees of US consulting firm after 2-year detention

China has released five employees of an American corporate investigations firm, the Mintz Group, two years after they were detained as part of a crackdown by Beijing on foreign business consultancies.

“We understand that the Mintz Group Beijing employees who were detained, all Chinese nationals, have now all been released,” the firm said in a statement Tuesday.

“We are grateful to the Chinese authorities that our former colleagues can now be home with their families,” the company said.

The employees’ release comes as China is trying to revive overseas investment to help revive its sluggish economy. Dozens of foreign executives, including Tim Cook of Apple and Cristiano Amon, the CEO of Qualcomm, are visiting Beijing this week to attend a development forum. Foreign investment that slowed to a crawl during COVID-19 has not recovered in the past couple years, as weak sales and overall demand in the Chinese economy have made it less attractive.

Several dozen CEOs and other leaders of global companies were expected to meet with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Friday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, according to a person with knowledge of the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. The gathering would be the third time in 17 months that Xi has met with the leaders of multinational companies, including in San Francisco in late 2023, after a summit with President Joe Biden outside the city.

The business forum was also attended by Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who said in an interview with The New York Times that he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Donald Trump and Xi.

The Mintz employees, who have not been identified, were detained during a raid of the firm’s Beijing office in March 2023. Later that year, China fined the company about $1.5 million for engaging in “foreign-related statistical investigation activities without obtaining approval,” according to Chinese state media.

Mintz, which is based in New York and has offices around the world, specializes in due diligence work — background checks, asset tracing, and fraud and corruption investigations — for client firms before they make investment decisions.

That kind of work became the target of Xi’s government, which appears to view due diligence into Chinese supply chains and Chinese corporate activity as a threat to national security and the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power.

A month after Mintz’s office was raided, Chinese authorities visited the Shanghai offices of the U.S. management consulting firm Bain & Co. and questioned its employees.

The crackdown on foreign consultancies was also viewed as a response to the Biden administration’s introduction of export controls on advanced US technology, such as semiconductors, to China.