The release of five employees detained during a due diligence probe into foreign companies comes as Beijing seeks to recapture overseas investment.
China has released five employees of the US corporate investigations firm Mintz Group, two years after they were detained as part of Beijing's crackdown on foreign business consultancies.
“To the best of our knowledge, the detained Mintz Group Beijing employees, all Chinese nationals, have now been released,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
“We are grateful to the Chinese authorities that our former colleagues can now be home with their families,” the company said.
The layoffs come as China tries to revive overseas investment to help revive its sluggish economy. Dozens of foreign executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, are visiting Beijing this week for a development forum. Foreign investment, which slowed to a crawl during Covid, has not recovered in the past couple of years as weak sales and overall demand in the Chinese economy have made it less attractive.
Several dozen CEOs and other global company leaders were scheduled to meet with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Friday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, according to a person familiar with the planning who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. The meeting would be the third time in 17 months that Mr. Xi has met with leaders of multinational companies, including in San Francisco in late 2023 after a summit with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. outside the city.
The business forum also included Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who told The New York Times that he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Mr. Xi.
Mintz employees, whose identities have not been disclosed, were detained during a raid on the company's Beijing office in March 2023. Later that year, China fined the company about $1.5 million for engaging in “foreign affairs-related statistical investigation activities without permission,” Chinese state media reported.
Headquartered in New York City with offices around the world, Mintz specializes in conducting comprehensive due diligence on clients—background checks, asset tracing, and fraud and corruption investigations—before they make investment decisions.
This kind of work has become a goal of Mr. Xi's government, which appears to view due diligence into Chinese supply chains and the activities of Chinese corporations as a threat to national security and the power of the ruling Communist Party.
A month after the search of Mintz's office, Chinese authorities visited the Shanghai office of the American consulting company Bain & Company and interrogated its employees.
The crackdown on foreign consulting firms was also seen as a response to the Biden administration's imposition of controls on exports of advanced American technologies such as semiconductors to China.
Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
David Pearson covers China's foreign policy and its economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about David Pearson
Keith Bradsher is The Times's Beijing bureau chief. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit, and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and worked in mainland China during the pandemic. More about Keith Bradsher
For more information, see: Timothy Cook, Steve Daines, Xi Jinping, Bain & Co.
