China acknowledges that a British man has been jailed on espionage charges

A British businessman who disappeared from public view in China in 2018 was sentenced to five years in prison in 2022, China's Foreign Ministry said on Friday in its first public acknowledgment of the case.

The businessman, Ian J. Stones, had lived in China since the 1970s and worked for companies such as General Motors and Pfizer. For years after he disappeared, there was no public information about his whereabouts, although some in the business community privately discussed his secret detention.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Mr. Stones was convicted in 2022 of “purchasing and unlawfully providing intelligence for an organization or individual outside China.” Mr Stones' appeal against the verdict was rejected in September 2023, spokesman Wang Wenbin said.

Mr. Wang responded to questions from reporters at a regularly scheduled news conference after The Wall Street Journal reported Mr. Stones' case on Thursday.

“The Chinese courts handled the trial strictly in accordance with the law,” Mr. Wang said, adding that China “protects the lawful rights of Chinese and foreign parties.”

It is unclear when Mr. Stones will be released and whether he will be credited with time served before his conviction.

Laura Stones, Mr. Stones' daughter, did not respond to a request for comment. But she told The Wall Street Journal that Chinese authorities had not given her and British embassy staff access to legal documents in the case, nor allowed them to attend the trial.

The revelation is likely to heighten concerns among foreign companies about the risks of operating in China in an increasingly insular political environment led by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the country's powerful security agencies.

China revised its already sweeping counterintelligence law last year to expand the definition of espionage and has repeatedly warned in recent months about the dangers of interactions with foreigners. Officials also raided the offices of several U.S. companies last year and arrested some Chinese employees.

Foreign governments have sometimes accused China of arresting foreigners as political pawns, as in the case of two Canadians arrested in 2018 after Canada arrested a prominent Chinese technology executive. An Australian businessman and writer, Yang Hengjun, remains in custody in China, and an Australian journalist, Cheng Lei, was released in October. Both were charged with unrelated national security offenses and have denied wrongdoing.

There is no official tally of the number of foreigners detained in China. Information about the charges against them is usually very limited. While the governments or relatives of detained foreigners sometimes speak out about their cases, some remain silent, possibly hoping to negotiate with Beijing behind the scenes.

Mr. Stones, who is in his 70s, has worked as a senior manager for General Motors Asia, where he helped expand into China in the 1990s, and as a manager in China for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. At the time of his detention, he had been working as a consultant for more than a decade, advising investors on deals, regulations and disputes in China, according to his LinkedIn page, which is no longer available online.

With his decades of experience in the country and his fluent knowledge of Chinese, he was well known among Western investors and executives in Beijing. On LinkedIn, Mr. Stones said that Navisino Partners, a consulting firm where he was a partner, specialized in “finding solutions to tough challenges, structuring deals, workouts and turnarounds.”

He also had relationships with Chinese government agencies; he had presented this to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, according to an annual report report in 2007 by The Conference Board, a New York-based business research group where he was a senior advisor.

The circumstances surrounding Mr Stones' arrest remain opaque, and it is unknown what communications took place between the British and Chinese governments. The British Foreign Office declined to comment.

Mr Stones' detention coincides with a period in which the British government has taken a tougher stance on China, often siding with critical positions taken by the United States. In 2020, it banned Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications equipment company, from involvement in Britain's new high-speed wireless network, a decision that Beijing condemned.

London's ties with Beijing have also deteriorated over China's ongoing crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong, a former British colony. Britain has also criticized China for its oppression of Muslims in the Xinjiang region, its military pressure on Taiwan and its continued partnership with Russia despite the war in Ukraine.