BEIJING: China worked with police in neighbouring Myanmar to nab the 16-year-old son of a detained rights lawyer and send him back home because he had been coerced into a plot to illegally migrate.

Activists said the boy was trying to flee house arrest after his parents’ rights lawyer Wang Yu and legal activist Bao Longjun were detained in July in a sweeping crackdown on civil society. The teenager, Bao Zhuoxuan, at the time was at Beijing airport on his way to Australia to attend high school when he and his father were intercepted by Chinese police.

Since then, Chinese authorities confiscated his passport and placed him under house arrest in Inner Mongolia with his grandmother. A network of activists then tried to help Bao escape to the US, where he had hoped to study.