The Forgotten American: Can There Be Life After 12 Years in a Chinese Prison?

The Forgotten American: Can There Be Life After 12 Years in a Chinese Prison?

One morning last November, at around 4 in the morning, guards at Dongguan Prison, in southern China, entered the cell where Mark Swidan was sleeping and started shaking him and telling him to get up.He was 49, and he had spent the past 12 years and 14 days behind bars for committing a crime—conspiring to manufacture drugs—that nobody in Washington, D.C., believed he had committed.For more than a decade, he had been in a windowless box with 31 ot…