Xi Jinping is trading human beings for diplomatic leverage and pocketing the receipts. The pastor is Ezra Jin Mingri, 57, and the publisher is Jimmy Lai, 77. One ate an In-N-Out hamburger in Los Angeles with his family the night before America’s 250th birthday. The other has been in a Hong Kong prison cell since 2020, and his trial has been repeatedly delayed, and he is unlikely to leave that cell alive. Both outcomes were chosen by the same man, for the same reason: what each of their lives cost him.
Now, I’m just a simple man who runs an auto shop, but I have worked a parts counter long enough to know what leverage looks like when somebody is using it on you. The customer who threatens to take his truck across town unless you knock twenty dollars off the bill — that is leverage. The landlord who reminds you every time the lease comes up that he has three families ready to move in — that is leverage. The boss who holds the layoff over your head right before the holidays so you will take the overtime without complaining — that is leverage. What Xi Jinping does with foreign prisoners is the same instrument, just sized up to where a man can be moved across fifteen time zones because a president asked and another president decided the asking price was one he could afford.
Trump raised both names with Xi in May, after his administration had been working Jin’s case for months. He told reporters afterward that Xi had agreed to give “serious consideration” to releasing the pastor. He described Lai’s situation as “a tough one.” Lai remains imprisoned.
Think about what just happened in that sentence. The President of the United States raised two names with the leader of China. One of those men flew home within weeks. The other man is still in his cell. The American president got a result he can talk about at a rally. The Chinese president got a result he can spend later. The only person who did not get a result out of this exchange is Jimmy Lai, and he is the one still inside a prison.
This is what the scholars call hostage diplomacy, and it is not a one-off. China has detained scholars, businesspeople, religious leaders, and journalists as instruments of state leverage for years. What makes Jin’s release distinctive is not that it happened but what it reveals about the mechanism: a state that detains and releases with strategic precision, calibrating each individual’s freedom against the political cost of granting it. Thomas Schelling, who spent his life studying how the powerful squeeze the less powerful, called most of what passes for statecraft “the diplomacy of violence” — making the cost of refusal higher than the cost of giving in. The part Schelling did not write down, but which any working person already knows, is that the bill always comes due somewhere. Somebody’s son, somebody’s husband, somebody’s father is the line item on somebody else’s ledger. In this case, that line item has a name. His name is Jimmy Lai. He is 77 years old. The international community has not moved him.
Why? Because Xi looked at the math. If he releases Jin, he spends nothing. Jin leads an underground church. Underground churches get raided, leaders get detained, leaders get released — the church keeps meeting in living rooms either way. There is no precedent Xi cannot manage, no signal of weakening to the security services that keep him in power, no concession on Hong Kong, no acknowledgment that the people of Hong Kong were ever owed anything. What he buys for that zero-cost gesture is a moment of goodwill in a relationship under sustained strain. He can hand the American president a win, take the receipt, and put it in his pocket for the next negotiation over tariffs, over semiconductors, over Taiwan.
If he releases Lai, he spends everything. Lai is not a pastor. Lai is a newspaper publisher who stood up for the democracy Beijing promised Hong Kong and then took back. Releasing Lai tells every organizer, every dissident, every foreign government watching: sustained pressure works on Beijing. Political prisoners come home. The architecture of control Xi has spent a decade building starts to look negotiable. That is a price he will not pay.
So Jin eats a hamburger in Los Angeles and Lai stays in his cell, and the man who made both of those things happen goes back to whatever meeting is next on his calendar, with a receipt in his pocket and another man who will not see his family for another year. This is not complicated. This is what power looks like when nobody in the room has to think about who is paying.
I have thought about this for a few days now, and what I keep coming back to is what Jin’s release does not do. It does not free the next person. It does not even free this person through any mechanism that will repeat. It frees this person because the man with the leverage decided, this once, that the cost of giving him back was lower than the cost of keeping him. Every month Lai remains in his cell is a confirmation of that calculation. The world is proving Xi right, day by day. Our tolerance for one old man in a Hong Kong prison is apparently higher than the domestic cost Xi would pay to let him go. We are showing him our price, and our price is nothing.
Andrew Bacevich, who served as a soldier and then spent his life writing about what America actually does in the world, wrote a book called Washington Rules about the bipartisan habit of sustaining foreign commitments that cost more than they yield. The pattern of American presidents raising individual cases with Beijing, getting a gesture in return, and accepting the gesture as a win — that is one such arrangement. The American president is doing the right thing when he raises the names. The mistake is in calling the gesture a result. The result is one free man and a ledger entry for Xi. The cost is the man still inside.
I keep thinking about Jin’s family at that In-N-Out. I keep thinking about what it would have meant if his wife and his children had driven to the airport and he had not been on the plane. I keep thinking about that other family, somewhere, who drove to the airport a long time ago and has been driving to a different airport ever since. The state does not see those families. The state sees leverage. The powerful count receipts.
The pastor is free. He should be. The publisher is in a cell. He should not be. The transaction that produced both of those facts was not a miracle. It was a man with power over human lives deciding, calmly, what each life was worth to him. That is the part of the story nobody in Washington wants to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require us to admit what our diplomacy actually trades in, and what our silence actually costs.
That is not a miracle. That is how the strong have always treated the weak. They just learned to do it with better manners.