State broadcaster CCTV has broadcast the distraught reaction of jailed dissident lawyer Wang Yu and her husband Bao Longjun as state security agents tell them they have stopped their 16-year old son trying to leave China.
Bao Zhuoxuan, who goes by the nickname "Mengmeng" and wants to study law when he graduates, was picked up by Chinese security forces in Burma (Myanmar) as he tried to flee to take up his studies abroad.
Both Ms Wang and her husband, a legal activist, break down in tears on being told of the failed attempt to smuggle their son overseas, with the scenes broadcast on national television.
In the CCTV report, the efforts to free him are described as a “conspiracy” organised by unnamed “foreign forces”.
Ms Wang subsequently makes a statement in which she condemns the actions of “foreign forces” trying to take her son out of China.
Activists say the statement was coerced.
Wang Yu and her husband have been detained under a form of solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for more than 100 days. They were part of a sweep of nearly 300 dissident lawyers, feminists and other dissidents that took place in July.
According to state media, they are accused of “subversion of state power”, the same charge used to jail Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and other dissidents.
The Xinhua news agency said that Bao Zhuoxuan was being forced to go abroad by anti-China forces overseas and that he was being held in China for his own protection.
He is reportedly being held under close surveillance at his grandmother’s house.
Passport confiscated
In July, Bao Zhuoxuan and his father were stopped at Beijing airport as they tried to leave for the boy to attend secondary school in Australia, but were told by police that his departure would “harm state security” and his passport was confiscated.
US State department spokesman John Kirby said the US was concerned about reports of Bao Zhuoxuan's detention.
“We are also disturbed by a seemingly systematic campaign by China to target family members of Chinese citizens who peacefully challenge official policy and work to protect the rights of others. If Bao Zhuoxuan’s family wishes him to study abroad like hundreds of thousands of other Chinese students, China should permit him to leave the country,” Mr Kirby said in reply to a question.
A number of children of leading dissidents have been refused permission to leave China, including the children of three lawyers from Ms Wang’s Fengrui law firm.
Human Rights in China (HRIC) reported that the son of another dissident lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, had been refused a passport to go abroad for graduate studies.
"My son is a fourth-year student at Nanchang University, and has planned to go abroad for graduate school after graduating next year," Mr Liu said on his WeChat social media page, cited by HRIC.
After his son asked why he would not be given a passport, an officer said it was the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau that had blocked him, for being part of a "reactionary organisation".
Also refused permission to leave was the son of another Fengrui Yu Hejin, who is in second year at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and was due to become an exchange student in the US for the last two years before his passport application was refused.
He was stopped at Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport as he tried to go with one of his teachers for a month-long exchange programme at Oxford.
The cases Ms Wang has represented include moderate ethnic Uighur academic Ilham Tohti, who was jailed for life on separatist charges, a verdict described by Amnesty International as "deplorable"; outspoken rights activist Cao Shunli, who died after being denied medical treatment in detention; and members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual group.
