Children of British man killed by Chinese wife separated after grandparents’ bitter custody battle

In a picture-postcard village in eastern England, Alice Simpson plays happily with young relatives, her infectious laughter ringing out across the rolling countryside that surrounds her grandparents’ 400-year-old thatched cottage. Chasing the family’s dogs as they bound alongside frosty ploughed fields and giggling uproariously in a game of hide-and-seek beside a red phone box on the village green, Alice looks entirely at home in this quintessentially English winter scene.

But this is no ordinary day for the six-year-old. Rather, it is the first of a new life in a village near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, following an extraordinary custody battle nearly 9,000km away that has resonated at the highest levels of government in London and Beijing.

Less than a fortnight earlier, Alice and her eight-year-old brother, Jack, were living in the starkly different setting of Nanzhang, Hubei province, as two sets of grandparents argued over who should care for them – and what price should be put on the children’s future.

British grandparents Ian and Linda Simpson, both 69, were ultimately forced to make a heartbreaking decision: bring Alice to Britain while leaving Jack behind or risk losing all contact with both grandchildren.

In March 2017, Alice and Jack’s father, Michael Simpson, 34 – an executive for the British retail outlet Next who had lived in China for eight years – was stabbed to death in a jealous rage in his Shanghai flat by his estranged wife, Fu Weiwei.

The couple, who met when Weiwei was a shop assistant at a Next outlet, had separated two years earlier, leaving Michael to raise Alice and Jack alone. The children lived a privileged expat­riate life in Shanghai, where Jack went to an international school. The family enjoyed holidays together in Europe and Thailand, and the children spent as much time with Ian and Linda as they did with their Chinese grandparents.