XiYue Wang, a naturalized American citizen originally from Beijing and former Ph.D. student at Princeton University now serving as a congressional staffer, spoke to assembled dinner guests (video) at the Middle East Forum’s Transformations 2023 conference about his unjust three-and-a-half-year imprisonment by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The following is a summation of his remarks:

Wang immigrated to the U.S. when he was twenty and became a citizen eight years later. He lived an idyllic life for an immigrant, studying South Asia during his undergraduate years at the University of Washington and Central Asia at Harvard for his MA. He worked for the Red Cross in Afghanistan, married, and had a child.

While pursuing his Ph.D. in history at Princeton, his life took a dramatic turn for the worse. In 2016, in the aftermath of the “Iran deal,” Wang was encouraged by Princeton to travel to Iran to do archival research on the obscure topic of nineteenth-century Turkic nomads, which he deemed “not a particularly politically charged topic.” Yet, after only a few weeks of research, he was arrested as a spy, a categorically false charge, and taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran.

Wang insisted that he was arrested solely because he is an American citizen, explaining that his captors told him, “If you were Chinese, this would not have happened.” The Iranian regime sought to hold him hostage as leverage in their relations with the U.S. In prison, he suffered long stints in solitary confinement and was used frequently as a propaganda tool. He spent just under ten months in a windowless cell and was allowed to see sunlight for twenty minutes twice weekly.

[This is a couple months old, but I just came across it and see it as still very much relevant. ~ Beege]