Swedish Quisling

Sweden Charges Ex-Ambassador to China Over Secret Meetings
The diplomat, Anna Lindstedt, arranged unauthorized talks between the daughter of a detained bookseller and two men representing Chinese interests.
By Iliana Magra and Chris Buckley

Sweden’s former ambassador to China has been charged with “arbitrariness during negotiations with a foreign power,” after she held what Swedish prosecutors said on Monday were unauthorized meetings with two men representing Chinese state interests.
The announcement of the charges was the latest twist in a four-year-old case, in which a Swedish citizen was spirited to China from Thailand, the ambassador held what the authorities say were secret meetings in a Stockholm hotel, and ties between China and Sweden have been strained.
The former ambassador, Anna Lindstedt, was accused earlier this year of arranging the talks between Angela Gui, the daughter of Gui Minhai, a Swedish bookseller detained in China, and two Chinese men who had offered to help free Mr. Gui in January.

Instead of talks about freeing her father, Ms. Gui was pressured to keep silent.
After the talks at a Stockholm hotel, Ms. Gui accused Lindstedt, the ambassador at the time, of arranging the talks without authorization from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. 

The ministry opened an internal investigation into Lindstedt in mid-February.

Swedish Quisling Anna Lindstedt

“In this specific consular matter, she has exceeded her mandate and has therefore rendered herself criminally liable,” Hans Ihrman, the deputy chief public prosecutor for Sweden’s National Security Unit, said in a statement on Monday. 

Mr. Ihrman said the charge of arbitrariness during negotiations with a foreign power was “unprecedented.”
“We have looked way back to find any kind of indictment for this, but in modern times we have no trail of an investigation,” he said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Ihrman described the meeting as an attempt by Chinese officials to stop Ms. Gui’s criticism of the Chinese government because of the treatment of her father.
“It’s about this daughter’s right to freedom of speech, which they have tried to act upon,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, Lindstedt acted on her own without the necessary support or permission from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
The charge can bring a maximum prison sentence of two years under the Swedish Penal Code. 

A trial date for Lindstedt has not been set, Mr. Ihrman said. 

The Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported Monday that prosecutors chose a milder charge than what the government’s security service had sought, “disloyalty when negotiating with a foreign power,” which carries up to a 10-year sentence.

Mr. Gui was one of five Hong Kong-based publishers who were abducted and taken to China in 2015 after publishing books that were critical of the Communist Party elite, setting off international condemnation.
After being taken from Thailand to China in 2015, he was formally released two years later but was not allowed to leave the country.
Mr. Gui was again detained early last year, when two Swedish diplomats tried to accompany him on a train from Shanghai to Beijing, where they planned to take him into the Swedish Embassy. 

But Chinese police officers boarded the train and took him into custody.
They said later that Mr. Gui was suspected of illegally providing state secrets, but gave no details or evidence. 

Soon after, the Chinese authorities brought Mr. Gui before a group of reporters, and he told them that the Swedish diplomats had wanted to spirit him back to Sweden.
Mr. Ihrman, the Swedish prosecutor, said on Monday that Mr. Gui was in a Chinese prison.
Relations between Sweden and China have been strained since Gui Minhai was kidnapped in 2015, and tensions increased last month when the Swedish office of the writers’ group PEN said that it was awarding a literary prize to Mr. Gui. 

The prize is given annually to an author or publisher who is persecuted, threatened or living in exile.
Three days later, the Chinese Embassy in Stockholm called the prize a “farce” and threatened consequences if members of the Swedish government were to attend the award ceremony.
A week later, Amanda Lind, Sweden’s minister of culture, not only attended the ceremony but also awarded the prize, despite warnings from the Chinese ambassador that Ms. Lind and other government officials working in the area of culture would no longer be welcome in China.
Late last month, China appeared to follow through on its warning, with SVT reporting that two Swedish films had been banned from screenings in China.
Last week, after a seminar in Gothenburg, Sweden, on Swedish-Chinese relations, the Chinese ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, told the newspaper Goteborgs-Posten that China would limit trade with Sweden because of its handling of the Gui Minhai case.

Jesper Bengtsson, the chairman of Swedish PEN, said the organization was surprised by the “amazingly” strong response from China to this year’s award.

“Governments and regimes have often reacted but never with threats, and threatening to block ministers from visiting China, Mr. Bengtsson said in a telephone interview, adding that the Swedish culture minister always attends the award ceremony.
Previous prize recipients include Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights lawyer who is serving a 38-year prison sentence after being convicted of crimes against national security, and Dawit Isaak, a Swedish-Eritrean journalist who was arrested in Eritrea in 2001 on security charges and has been imprisoned without a trial ever since.

Sweden Recalls Ambassador to China in Twist in Bookseller’s Detention

Ambassador arranged meeting where Chinese demanded media silence in exchange for Gui Minhai’s release
By Eva Dou
Anna Lindstedt, Sweden’s ambassador to China, is the second Western ambassador to China recalled in a month.

BEIJING—Sweden has recalled its ambassador to China and opened an internal investigation into her role in arranging a meeting where Chinese businessmen threatened the daughter of a detained Swedish bookseller, Sweden’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday.
Anna Lindstedt is the second Western ambassador to China recalled in a month, stoking concerns about China’s potential growing leverage over foreign diplomats.
It was also another bizarre twist in the case of the bookseller Gui Minhai—whose detention has drawn widespread attention from Western governments, angering Beijing. 

Mr. Gui is a Chinese-born Swedish citizen and had been based in Hong Kong, where he specialized in selling political titles banned in mainland China. 

He first disappeared from his Thailand home in 2015 into Chinese custody, then was snatched again by Chinese agents last year while on a train with Swedish diplomats. 

He remains in custody, facing unspecified state-secret charges.
Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui, alleged on Wednesday in a widely circulated essay on the website Medium that Ms. Lindstedt had contacted her in mid-January, inviting her to meet some Chinese businessmen in Stockholm who offered to help with Mr. Gui’s case. 

The meetings turned strange, with the men requesting she not leave the hotel during the day, plying her with wine and asking her to go work with them in China.

Angela Gui, whose father is in Chinese custody facing unspecified state-secret charges. 

The men demanded she stop making public statements, in exchange for her father’s release with a reduced penalty. 

Ms. Lindstedt attended the meetings and agreed with the plan, Ms. Gui wrote.
“I was taken aback and said I didn’t trust him,” she wrote of one of the unnamed businessmen. 

“He then said, ‘You have to trust me, or you will never see your father again.’ ”
Ms. Lindstedt told her China might punish Sweden if she continued her activism and that officials at Sweden’s Foreign Ministry were unaware that Ms. Lindstedt had arranged the meeting.
An email to Ms. Lindstedt’s email address returned an auto reply: “I have finished my mission in Beijing to move back to Sweden.”
Ms. Gui didn’t respond to emails from the Journal on Thursday.
Rasmus Eljanskog, a press officer for Sweden’s Foreign Ministry, said in an emailed statement that an internal investigation has been initiated “due to information concerning incorrect action in connection with events at the end of January.” 

He declined to comment on details of the allegations.
Sweden takes cases involving restrictions on freedom of expression seriously, Mr. Eljanskog said.
Karl-Olof Andersson, deputy head of the Swedish Embassy in Beijing, said by telephone that he is acting head of the mission and referred further questions to Stockholm.
The case came weeks after Canada’s ambassador to China was fired for saying a senior Huawei Technologies Co. executive arrested at U.S. request had a good case to fight extradition.

State hooliganism: Sweden criticises China's 'unacceptable' behaviour in detaining bookseller

Foreign minister Margot Wallström demands that Beijing give Gui Minhai access to medical and diplomatic staff
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Gui Minhai, seen on Chinese state television in 2016, has been denied access to a Swedish doctor.

Sweden has accused Beijing of refusing to give a Swedish doctor access to Gui Minhai, the jailed Hong Kong bookseller who was snatched from a Beijing-bound bullet train in January.
“China’s action is unacceptable and breaks previous assurances that our citizen would be given the opportunity to see a Swedish doctor,” the Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallström, said in a statement.

“Our work on the case continues unabated. We continue to demand that Mr Gui be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff, and that he be released so that he can be reunited with his daughter and family,” Wallström added.
Gui, 53, was travelling to Beijing with two Swedish diplomats when he was seized by plainclothes agents on 20 January.
It was the latest chapter in a bewildering two-year saga that began in 2015 when the publisher disappeared from his Thai holiday home only to resurface in custody in mainland China, where he remained until he was allowed out of prison last October.
Some had believed the China-born publisher, who became a Swedish citizen in 1992, was on the verge of freedom. 

However, those hopes have faded since his second detention and fears are now mounting over the state of Gui’s health.
Supporters claim that on the day he was taken, Gui – who may have offended senior Chinese leaders with his gossip-filled books on Communist party politics – had been travelling to the Swedish embassy for a medical examination because of concerns he was suffering from a rare neurological disease.
“He explained to me that he couldn’t really control the movement in his fingers very well … that was obviously quite concerning,” Angela Gui, his daughter, told the Guardian last month.
Chinese authorities have played down those concerns, claiming Gui has been attended to by Chinese doctors. 

Last month dozens of EU politicians wrote to Xi Jinping to demand Gui’s “immediate and unconditional release”.
“Gui is not the first European citizen to be wrongfully detained in China, but we aspire to make him the last one,” the letter said.

China's State Terrorism

'A very scary movie': how China snatched Gui Minhai on the 11.10 train to Beijing
Details of the extraordinary detention of the Hong Kong bookseller as he sought help from Swedish diplomats
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

 The last picture that Angela Gui has of her father, the detained publisher Gui Minhai. 

The 11.10am to Beijing left on time, gliding out of Shanghai’s cavernous high-speed rail terminal and darting north through the cheerless suburban sprawl.
On board the sleek, white bullet train sat an unlikely trio of Europeans, one of whom held the key to a real-life political thriller so frightening and tangled it has left all those trying to decipher it both gripped and unnerved.
Only two of the trio would make it to their final destination.
As the G126 hurtled towards the Chinese capital on 20 January, at speeds of up to 350km an hour, the latest dramatic chapter in a surreal two-year saga was about to unfold.
For one of the passengers was Gui Minhai, a portly Swedish publisher once famed for his scandalous tomes about the leaders of the world’s second largest economy.
Just over two years earlier, in October 2015, Gui had vanished from his holiday home in Thailand, one of five Hong Kong booksellers snatched in still-unexplained circumstances during what many suspect was a political witch-hunt to silence or punish those who dared defame the Communist party’s great and good.
Now, the 53-year-old publisher – who had only recently emerged from Chinese custody and was travelling with Sweden’s consul general in Shanghai, Lisette Lindahl, and another Swedish diplomat – was about to disappear again.
At just after 3pm, the train pulled into Jinan West station in Shandong province, about 400km shy of its destination. 

The doors slid open and a gaggle of plainclothes agents pushed into the carriage. 

As they lifted the bookseller from his seat, an English-speaking female officer announced a police operation was underway. 

“They had no uniforms and no credentials,” said one source with knowledge of the day’s events. “They simply took him.”
Within seconds Gui Minhai was gone.
“Perhaps something like this was planned all along and there was no way of stopping it,” Gui’s daughter, Angela, reflects a fortnight later, as she considers the latest misfortune to befall her father.
‘China doesn’t mind how ridiculous it makes itself look’
Magnus Fiskesjö, who first met the bookseller in 1980s Beijing and has been a friend since, said he was stumped by Gui’s increasingly mysterious tale.
“It’s a very scary movie,” the Cornell University academic sighed. 

“It’s astounding, astounding … I find myself speculating quite wildly as to why they would do this.”
Fiskesjö is not alone.
China’s official explanation – made public on 9 February after the bookseller was paraded before a group of Beijing-friendly reporters at a facility in east China – is that Gui is suspected of leaking state secrets to “overseas groups” and trying to skip the country as part of a Swedish plot. (Supporters say Gui had been travelling to the Swedish embassy for a medical examination amid fears he was suffering from a rare neurological disease).
“I fell for it,” the bookseller claimed in a video activists rejected as a forced confession.

Few, perhaps not even within China’s corridors of power, believe that implausible narrative though.
“The thing that is so surprising is the failure of the Chinese government to put out a coherent explanation that does not subject them to ridicule,” says Jerome Cohen, a New York University expert in Chinese law and human rights.
“The People’s Republic of China doesn’t mind how ridiculous it makes itself look. It’s like a second-rate comedy show – only the joke is on Gui.”

A new wave of oppression
The absence of hard facts or credible Chinese justifications has spawned a cottage industry of dark hypotheses and conspiracy theories about what has happened to Gui and, crucially, why.
From his desk in Ithaca, New York, where he tracks the ever more serpentine case, Fiskesjö reels off his theses – not one of them, he concedes, provable.
Had Gui been snatched by rogue agents or fallen victim to a botched handover between poorly coordinated security forces? 

Was he a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess that a newly assertive Beijing was using to humiliate and intimidate Sweden and the west?
Or was Gui simply another victim of an aggressive crackdown on dissent that followed Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012?
“We’ve seen a new wave of oppression and repression and unfortunately Gui Minhai’s case fits into that,” Fiskesjö says.
But Fiskesjö and others are haunted by another possibility: that Gui had either published or picked up some toxic nugget of information that had enraged one of China’s top leaders and made the bookseller the target of a vicious and unstoppable campaign of retribution.
“[In China] powerful bosses can just say something and have it happen,” Fiskesjö says. 

“My best guess,” speculated another source, “is that he either has – or the Chinese think he has – information which would be harmful to the reputation of someone in the leadership.”
One thing seems certain, says Fiskesjö. 

At some point after Gui’s detention a high-level decision was taken: “‘No, we cannot let him go ... we have to silence him.’ Why that would be?” the academic mused. 

“I don’t understand.”
Gui’s 23-year-old daughter has also been trying to decode his predicament since they last spoke, on the eve of his detention. 

She has another theory.
From October 2015, when the publisher disappeared from his beachfront holiday home, until his partial release in October 2017, virtually nothing is known about Gui’s plight, beyond that he was held for a time in the eastern port city of Ningbo.

The scene at Gui Minhai’s Thai apartment after he ‘disappeared’ – as seen by The Guardian when it visited. 

Gui’s daughter suspects the “state secrets” he supposedly possesses actually relate to his own story, specifically his illegal rendition and subsequent mistreatment in Chinese custody.
During regular Skype conversations, permitted after he was placed under surveillance in a Ningbo flat in October last year, she said her father repeatedly hinted at such abuse. “For obvious reasons he wasn’t able to speak very freely about it ... So, I had to do a lot of guessing. But it is quite clear to me that he has been tortured.”
Cohen, who has spent decades studying China’s human rights landscape, finds the theory convincing.
“What secrets would this man have, other than what he learned through his own kidnapping and his own mistreatment once he got back to China?” he says.
“This fellow, if he wanted to tell the truth about being kidnapped from Thailand, could be a real embarrassment to China ... I think they don’t want him to talk … you get certain people they are afraid ever to let loose.”

The west pushes back
Gui’s detention has caused a serious diplomatic rupture, as well as a personal tragedy, pitting an increasingly feisty China against Sweden and other European Union nations who fear their citizens could be next.
“The handling of the case, including the forced TV confessions, is more reminiscent of Cultural Revolution tactics than rule of law,” complains one Beijing-based western diplomat. 

“The bullying of a smaller country like Sweden ... will not help to improve China’s image abroad.”
After initially struggling to explain Gui’s capture, Beijing has gone on the offensive, accusing Stockholm of “grossly” meddling and warning its protests could harm ties.
Western governments have pushed back, with Sweden condemning China’s “brutal intervention” and EU and US officials also demanding Gui’s release. 

But Stockholm, and the wider international community, are not doing enough.
“Beijing acts towards human beings as a reckless tyrant – and increasingly as a bully to other countries,” the Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers, warned in an editorial criticising Stockholm’s “cowardly and wrong” response. 

Europe needed to fight back “when China bares its fangs”.

Gui Minhai, right, next to his university friend Bei Ling in 2008.

‘A jovial, funny guy’
The latest twist in Gui Minhai’s extraordinary publishing career would have been unthinkable when it began in 1980s Beijing.
Gui, then in his early 20s, was a budding poet whose verses appeared in the samizdat-style pamphlets that circulated during what was a rare period of political and intellectual freedom that ended abruptly with 1989’s Tiananmen massacre.
“He was always this jovial, funny guy,” recalls Fiskesjö, then the Swedish embassy’s cultural attaché.
Gui made his name – and fortune – with lewd tomes on the intrigues of Chinese leaders. 

But Fiskesjö says he was also a serious mind, who spent years studying Scandinavia after swapping Beijing for Gothenburg in 1988.
Gui’s PhD, completed in 1991, the year before he became a Swedish citizen, was called Feudalism in Chinese Marxist Historiography. 

Then came works on the Swedish East India Company and Norse mythology. 

“It’s a fascinating introduction for Chinese readers about Odin and Thor and all of those figures,” Fiskesjö says of the latter. 

“He definitely wasn’t confined to this ... political gossip genre.”
Fiskesjö remembers, too, the hope-infused verses of a gifted poet.
In one 1986 composition, Longing for Greece, Gui writes:

I will hitch a ride with a small fish,

And go to Greece.

To visit the cities that breathe through gills,

Cities carved out with a kitchen knife.

History rises above the horizon,

Rising, oval.

An inward olive,

Held in in my mouth.

Cannot be spoken.

Gui’s daughter, who lives in Britain and recently earned a master’s degree from the University of Warwick, says her father continued to compose and memorise poems – often focusing on his Swedish identity – while in custody. 

Before his latest detention, “he was in the process of writing them down and was hoping to publish them”.
That, though, was before he boarded the 11.10am to Beijing and before he was marched off, once again, towards a televised confession and an uncertain future. 

Angela Gui, whose father Gui Minhai disappeared on 17 October, 2015. 

In one of their final Skype chats, Angela Gui recalls joking and “talking shit” with her genial father, as was their norm.
“He hadn’t at all lost his personality,” she said. 

“And he also said, ‘You know what I think ... defines me, and what has defined me through this entire experience, is that I’ll always be an optimist.’
“He said he thought everything was going to be OK – in some way – and he had to keep working and he had to keep doing what he wanted to do and in some way things were going to be OK.”
Just over 24 hours after their last online encounter, on 19 January 2018, Gui was gone.
When he reappeared before the cameras three weeks later the bookseller delivered what some read as a farewell.
“My message to my family is that I hope that [they] will live a good life,” Gui said. 

“Don’t worry about me. I will solve my own problems.”

China's state terrorism

Sweden condemns China's brutal detention of bookseller Gui Minhai
Swedish citizen was picked up by plainclothes agents on 20 January as he travelled on a train to Beijing with two Swedish diplomats
By Tom Phillips

Sweden’s foreign minister has condemned China’s “brutal” detention of a Hong Kong bookseller who irked Beijing with his tabloid-style stories about the Communist party elite.
Gui Minhai, a China-born Swedish citizen, was picked up by plainclothes agents on 20 January as he travelled on a train to Beijing with two Swedish diplomats. 

Supporters said he had been traveling to the Chinese capital for a medical examination.
Gui had spent much of the previous two years in custody in east China after his kidnapping from his holiday home in Thailand. 

Until his second disappearance, hopes had been rising among supporters for his release.
In a statement Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, said: “The continued detention of the Swedish citizen Gui Minhai in China is a very serious matter.”
Wallstrom labelled the action against Gui and the two diplomats as a “brutal intervention”: “China’s actions were in contravention of basic international rules on consular support.
“We demand that our citizen be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff, and that he be released so that he can be reunited with his daughter and family.”
The statement signals a marked escalation from Sweden which has been publicly cautious over the case ever since Gui first went missing in October 2015.
On Sunday the publisher’s daughter, Angela Gui, told the Guardian that her father’s whereabouts remained a mystery.

State Terrorism

Daughter's fears grow over bookseller missing in China

AFP

It is the second time Gui Minhai has been snatched in murky circumstanced following his 2015 disappearance from Thailand. 

HONG KONG -- The daughter of missing Swedish publisher Gui Minhai who was snatched in China last month says she fears she may never see him again and has urged the international community to take action.
Gui was arrested on a train to Beijing just over two weeks ago while accompanied by two Swedish diplomats -- the second time he has disappeared in murky circumstances into Chinese custody.
His daughter Angela Gui, 23, told AFP she had heard nothing from him since and had received no information about where he might be.

Angela Gui as a child with and her father Gui Minhai. 
"There are all sorts of awful scenarios that could be unfolding," she said, speaking from England, where she is a student.
The United States and European Union have called for Gui's immediate release and his disappearance has sparked a diplomatic row between Stockholm and Beijing.
But Chinese authorities have so far publicly parried requests for information, suggesting only that Swedish diplomats had somehow violated Chinese law.
Civil society has come under increasing pressure since Xi Jinping took office in 2012, with authorities rounding up hundreds of lawyers and activists.
"I just hope that Sweden and other governments will be as vocal as possible," Angela said.
"I want them to demonstrate actual consequences, instead of just repeating how unacceptable it is."
It is the second time 53-year-old Gui, who was born in China but went on to become a Swedish citizen, has been snatched.
He first disappeared in 2015, one of five Hong Kong-based booksellers known for publishing gossipy titles about Chinese political leaders who went missing and resurfaced in the mainland.
Gui vanished while on holiday in Thailand and eventually surfaced at an undisclosed location in China, confessing to involvement in a fatal traffic accident and smuggling illegal books.
Chinese authorities declared they had released him in October but his daughter said he was under "loose house arrest" in the eastern mainland city of Ningbo, where some of his relatives still live.
Angela told AFP she had spoken to her father on Skype multiple times a week in the past three months and that he was able to move around the city, but was followed by police.
He had been allowed to go to the Swedish consulate in Shanghai three times to apply for documentation, including a new passport, and Angela said she did not believe he had been told explicitly to stay in Ningbo.
Angela graduated from England's Warwick University with a master's degree the day before her father disappeared again and had spoken to him ahead of the ceremony.

Angela Gui, who is studying in the UK, says she fears for her father's safety after he was snatched by Chinese security forces. 

"He said: 'I'm very sorry that I can't be there'. I told him it was alright because I'm doing my doctorate now, so there was another one for him to come to," she said.
"I was hoping that there would be an end to this soon and that he might be able to come home."

MEDICAL HELP
On Jan 20, Gui was grabbed by plainclothes police while on a train between Ningbo and Beijing, where he was due to have a medical appointment.
Chinese officials have given no public reason for his detention. 

Angela fears he may now be put on trial and receive a longer sentence, jeopardising his health.
Doctors in Ningbo said her father may have the neurological disease ALS -- he had been on his way to Beijing to see a Swedish specialist.
The muscles in his hands had begun to atrophy and he had lost some sensation in the soles of his feet, Angela said.
"If he does have ALS, perhaps he might not have that much time left," she told AFP.
China was widely criticised after veteran rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo died from liver cancer while on medical parole in July last year.
Rights groups had pushed for him to be allowed to seek medical treatment abroad. 

It was the first time a Nobel laureate had died in custody since Nazi Germany.

Factfile on Hong Kong bookseller snatched by Beijing. 

Angela said the international community must snap out of its "paralysis" over the case, describing her frustration that more had not been done to get her father out of China sooner.
"He shouldn't have been abducted again in the first place -- there should have been a way of getting him home before that," she said.
"Or there should have been a way of making sure he was safe when he was travelling."
A spokesman for the Swedish government told AFP that "intense efforts" were underway, but would not say if they had received any information as to Gui's whereabouts.
A Western diplomat in Beijing said he feared Gui would not be released "any time soon".
"The circumstances of his abduction are unprecedented," he told AFP.

Han terrorism: Condemn China for kidnapping Gui Minhai

As Sweden’s reaction to the seizing of its citizen shows, countries allow Beijing to flout human rights in exchange for trade deals
By Jojje Olsson

The kidnapping of a foreign citizen in front of accompanying diplomats constitutes a new level of assault, even for China.
If the world does not condemn it in the strongest possible terms, it will also represent a new level of submission, encouraging China to continue exporting its repression abroad.
Ever since Swedish publisher Gui Minhai was first kidnapped in October 2015, my government’s primary focus in its relations with China has been to increase economic cooperation. 

Last year, our prime minister, Stefan Löfven, visited China with the largest Swedish trade delegation in decades.
Yet while Löfven claimed he had raised the issue of Gui Minhai behind closed doors, neither he nor anyone else, uttered a single word about Gui in public. 

The post-trip communique was packed with details about new trade deals and economic cooperation. Not a single line mentioned the Swedish political prisoner who was falling sick behind bars at a secret location far from conventions and banquets.
The quiet diplomacy that has characterised Sweden’s handling of Gui Minhai stands in stark contrast to the case of Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson, two Swedish journalists who were jailed in Ethiopia in 2011. 

Swedish ministers became personally involved in that case almost immediately. 

The prime minister branded Ethiopia a “dictatorship”.
Gui Minhai has enjoyed no such support. 

Despite several requests, his daughter, Angela Gui, only managed to speak on the phone with foreign minister Margot Wallström for the first time at the weekend. 

The foreign ministry has told her not to contact the Swedish embassy in Beijing. 

Last year Angela told me that Lars Fredén, the Swedish ambassador to China until 2016, had deliberately avoided her when they ended up at the same social event in Stockholm.
Gui was kidnapped for a second time last Saturday. 

But only after the story was reported on Monday did Wallström issue a short statement calling for “the immediate release of our fellow citizen”.
That was the first time during Gui’s 829 days of extralegal detention that the Swedish authorities had openly criticised China’s actions.

That is, of course, exactly the way Beijing wants it. 

Because shedding light on the regime’s oppression hurts its ambitions to build its soft power to help increase the Chinese influence in international organisations, and make overseas investments with as little scrutiny as possible.
Several western countries have already been brought into line by the stick and carrot of economic cooperation. 

When Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel peace prize in 2010, Beijing severed diplomatic and trade relations with Oslo. 

Only after the Norwegian foreign minister in late 2016 travelled to Beijing and read aloud a humiliating joint statement was Norway again able to export its salmon to China.
Despite all his flattery of China, David Cameron’s government was warned that Britain should not dare comment on Beijing’s erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms.
Nowhere is Beijing’s disregard for international treaties more obvious than in the South China Sea, which China continues to militarise, despite international censure and a damning ruling from an international tribunal in 2016.
China is also succeeding in silencing the European Union’s criticism of its behaviour. 

Last year, Hungary and Greece, both big destinations for Chinese loans and investments, blocked two EU joint statements on the deteriorating human rights situation in China.
After the two Swedish journalists were released from Ethiopian jail in 2012, Sweden’ ambassador hailed international pressure as a decisive factor. 

Sweden now needs to reach out to the international community for a similar cooperation on Gui Minhai. 

Every politician who still claims a shred of morality must step out and speak out.

China's State Hooliganism

Sweden summons Chinese ambassador over kidnapping of Gui Minhai

The situation has worsened since the bookseller was taken by police while travelling on a train to Beijing
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Sweden has summoned China’s ambassador to Stockholm to explain the dramatic snatching of a Swedish bookseller as he travelled to Beijing with two European diplomats.
Gui Minhai, 53, was taken on Saturday by about 10 plainclothes officers as his train stopped at a station outside the Chinese capital.

His current whereabouts is unknown.
It is the second time in just over two years that Gui, a Hong Kong publisher who had specialised in melodramatic tomes about China’s political elite, has been seized by Chinese agents. 

In October 2015 Gui vanished from his Thai holiday home, later resurfacing in detention in China where he made what supporters denounced as a forced televised confession. 

Gui had seemed on the verge of release last autumn but this week’s dramatic development has shattered those hopes.

Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai snatched by Chinese agents from train.

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s foreign minister, told reporters her government had “detailed knowledge” of Saturday’s events and was “working round the clock” on the issue. 

“The situation has now worsened since Saturday morning,” she admitted.
Criticism of China’s actions -- and Stockholm’s so far timid public response to Gui’s ordeal -- intensified after reports of his latest detention. 

“This was precisely what wasn’t supposed to happen,” the bookseller’s daughter, Angela Gui, told the Guardian.
“I think it is quite clear that he has been abducted again and that he’s being held somewhere at a secret location,” she added in an interview with Radio Sweden.
In an editorial entitled ‘Is there anything China won’t get away with?’ Sweden’s Borås Tidning newspaper said it was time to stand up to a bullying Beijing: “The scariest part of the news about the Swedish publisher isn’t so much that Chinese authorities have caught him again but the arrogance the manner of his arrest demonstrates to the rest of the world.”
It warned: “This is a new China that we see; a China which, with its ever-growing tentacles, wants to build a huge port in Lysekil … which builds nuclear power plants in the UK, which wants to build an Arctic highway from Norway to Moscow … a China that is not afraid of the diplomatic repercussions that may arise from grabbing a Swedish book publisher in front of the employees of Margot Wallström.”
Diplomats and observers say that under Xi Jinping, who was recently crowned China’s most dominant ruler since Mao Zedong, Beijing has become increasingly deaf to foreign criticism and inclined to throw its weight around, wagering cash-hungry governments will not challenge its actions.
“There is really a new, harsher tone in their approach. It wasn’t like this a few years ago,” said one western diplomat who declined to be named because of the political sensitivities involved.
“I think they’ve become over confident and are overplaying their hand,” the diplomat added. 

“And there is an increasing push-back from all over the world.”
Jojje Olsson, a Swedish writer who has written a book about Gui’s saga, said Saturday’s “kidnapping” underlined how Beijing cared more about silencing dissent than its international image: “It shows the Chinese government cares less and less about criticism from the outside -- they would rather set an example that you cannot get away when you criticise the government, than listen to foreign governments or foreign media.”
Olsson contrasted Stockholm’s handling of Gui’s case with its efforts to free two Swedish journalists who were imprisoned in Ethiopia in 2011. 

“Back then, the Swedish government was very quick to get involved ... the foreign minister travelled to Ethiopia twice ... [But] in the case of Gui Minhai obviously it has been very muted.” 

Sweden’s foreign minister had not once spoken to Angela Gui, Olsson claimed.
“They say they are working ... "behind the scenes" but they are being very careful in putting official pressure on China. That is, of course, how China would like it.”

Bookseller Gui Minhai 'half free' after being detained in China for two years

Hong Kong publisher who specialised in books about China’s political elite vanished from Thailand in 2015
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Earlier this week Chinese authorities claimed Gui had been released on 17 October although his daughter disputed that claim. 

A Swedish bookseller who spent more than two years in custody after his abduction by Chinese agents is now “half free”, a friend has claimed, amid suspicions he is still being held under guard by security officials in eastern China.
Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-based publisher who specialised in books about China’s political elite, mysteriously vanished from his Thai holiday home in October 2015. 

He later reappeared in mainland China where he was imprisoned on charges relating to a deadly drunk-driving incident more than a decade earlier.
Gui’s disappearance – and that of four other booksellers, including one British citizen – was seen as part of a wider crackdown on Communist party opponents that has gripped China since Xi Jinping took power in 2012.
Details of Gui’s two-year detention have remained murky but he is understood to have been held for at least part of that time in the eastern port city of Ningbo. 

Earlier this week Chinese authorities claimed he had been released on 17 October, although Gui’s daughter, Angela, disputed that claim on Tuesday, telling the Guardian he had yet to contact her and appeared still to be in “some sort of custody”.
On Friday, after several days of uncertainty about Gui’s whereabouts, reports emerged that appeared to confirm his partial release.
Bei Ling, a Boston-based dissident writer and friend, said Gui was in Ningbo and living in rented accomodation. 

He said Gui held a 40-minute phone conversation with his daughter on Thursday night. 

However, Bei told the Hong Kong Free Press website that his friend was only “half free”.
Angela Gui told the Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK there were “many things that need to be clarified” about her father’s situation and declined to comment further. 

“She said she had received a phone call, but did not confirm it was from her father,” RTHK reported.
A spokesperson for Sweden’s foreign ministry said: “We have received reports from the Chinese authorities that Gui Minhai has been released and we’re doing our best to obtain more information.”
Activists suspect that rather than completely freeing Gui, Chinese authorities have moved him from a detention centre into what they call China’s “non-release release” system. 

Under this Kafka-esque system, regime opponents are nominally freed but in fact continue to live under the watch and guard of security agents.
“Non-release release” has been the fate of a number of those targeted as part of Xi’s campaign against human rights lawyers, which has seen some of the country’s leading civil rights attorneys spirited into secret detention before “reappearing” in a different form of captivity.
Bei told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post Gui had informed relatives he wanted to travel to Germany: “But for now, he is not sure if the Chinese authorities will allow him to leave China.
“He will only enjoy true freedom if he is allowed to leave China. If he cannot leave China, he could end up just like Liu Xia,” Bei added, referring to the wife of the late Nobel laureate who has also been living under the watch of security agents since her husband’s death in July.

Speaking on Tuesday, the bookseller’s daughter said she was deeply concerned about his wellbeing: “He has allegedly been released but it looks like he is still in some sort of custody... the fact that nobody can contact him and nobody knows where he is, legally constitutes an enforced disappearance, again.”

Exactly what happened to Gui and his bookselling colleagues and why they were targeted remains a mystery. 

However, in June last year, one of the other abducted men, Lam Wing-kee, claimed he had been kidnapped by Chinese special forces as part of a coordinated effort to silence criticism of China’s leadership.
Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based activist for Amnesty International who is following the case, said: “Definitely he is still under surveillance otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t be so mysterious.”
“We still need to see whether the authorities will allow him to go [to Germany] and it seems to me that he will still be under surveillance for some time before he is allowed to go.”
Poon said it was also unclear whether Chinese authorities had placed conditions on Gui’s release such as “not disclosing what happened to him during his time in detention [or] requiring him not to talk about his case when he leaves China”.

Hong Kong bookseller released by China is missing -- daughter

BBC News

Angela Gui said she was still waiting to hear from her father a week after his release

Sweden says its citizen Gui Minhai, one of the five jailed "Hong Kong booksellers", has been released from prison in China.
But Mr Gui's daughter, Angela, said no-one had seen him or spoken to him a week after his supposed release.
Mr Gui's Hong Kong publishing house sold books about the personal lives of China's political elite.
He disappeared in Thailand in October 2015 before mysteriously turning up in detention in mainland China.
Mr Gui was officially in prison after confessing to a fatal road accident which allegedly took place in 2003. 

His daughter says the confession was forced.
The four other members of the publishing company detained in China were previously released. Three remained silent about their detention.
But one, Lam Wing-kee, who has no family on mainland China, said the confessions shown on Chinese television were forced, read from a script written by Chinese officials.
He also alleged one of the men, Lee Bo, had been abducted from Hong Kong against his will.
Allegations that Mr Lee and Mr Gui were abducted across international borders in an extrajudicial process sparked international concern.
Chinese officials say he and the four other men detained all went to China voluntarily.

'No idea where'
On Tuesday, after Mr Gui's release was announced, his daughter Angela Gui said: "I still do not know where my father is."
A spokeswoman for the Swedish foreign ministry confirmed that information about Mr Gui's release had come from the Chinese authorities and said Sweden was seeking clarification.
No other official details were available.
Ms Gui, who lives in the UK, released a statement saying the Swedish embassy had been told, in advance that her father would be released on 17 October.
She said that when Swedish officials arrived on the morning of his release, they were told by prison officials that he had already left at midnight.
"They were also told that he was 'free to travel' and that they had no idea where he was," she added.
"Neither I nor any member of my family nor any of his friends have been contacted. It is still very unclear where he is. I am deeply concerned for his wellbeing."

Rogue Nation

China Wields Its "Laws" to Silence Critics From Abroad
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and CHRIS HORTON

Lee Ming-cheh, second from left, an activist from Taiwan, in court in the Chinese city of Yueyang, Hunan Province, last week. The case against Mr. Lee punctuates what critics warn are China’s efforts to stifle what it perceives as threats from overseas. 

BEIJING — On the morning he disappeared, the activist Lee Ming-cheh crossed from Macau into mainland China to meet with democracy advocates.
It was 177 days later when he reappeared in public, standing in the dock of a courtroom in central China last week, confessing to a conspiracy to subvert the Communist Party by circulating criticism on social media.
The circumstances surrounding Mr. Lee’s detainment remain murky, but what has made the case stand out from the many that the Chinese government brings against its critics is that Mr. Lee is not a citizen of China, but rather of Taiwan, the self-governing island over which Beijing claims sovereignty.
The proceedings against Mr. Lee, who is expected to be sentenced as soon as this week, punctuated what critics have warned are China’s brazen efforts to extend the reach of its security forces to stifle what it perceives as threats to its power emanating from overseas.
In recent months alone, China has sought the extradition of ethnic Uighur students studying overseas in Egypt and carried out the cinematic seizure of a billionaire from a Hong Kong hotel in violation of an agreement that allows the former British colony to run its own affairs. 

The billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, now appears to be a material witness in another politically tinged investigation against the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda.

China abruptly surfaced charges of "rape" against yet another billionaire, Guo Wengui, after he sought political asylum in the United States, where he has been making sensational accusations about the Communist Party’s leadership. 

Mr. Guo’s case could become a major test for the Trump administration’s relations with Beijing at a time of tensions over North Korea and trade.

The Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui has sought political asylum in the United States.

“China has been extending its clampdown — its choking of civil society — throughout the world, and often it is attempting this through official channels such as the U.N. or Interpol,” said Michael Caster, a rights campaigner who was a co-founder of the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group. “Unfortunately, they’re very adept at doing it.”
The Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, which provided seminars for lawyers and legal aid for defendants in China, folded last year after the country’s powerful Ministry of State Security arrested and held Mr. Caster’s colleague, Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, for 23 days.
Mr. Caster noted that Interpol’s president, Meng Hongwei, is a veteran of China’s state security apparatus. 

Human Rights Watch recently reported that China was blocking the work of United Nations agencies investigating rights issues and preventing critics from testifying at hearings, including in one case the leader of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa.
China’s economic clout has meant that few countries are willing to do much to challenge its extraterritorial legal maneuvers. 

Some have even gone along.
And countries as varied as Armenia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain and Vietnam have all extradited to China scores of people accused in a spate of telephone swindles targeting Chinese citizens, even though the suspects are, like Mr. Lee, citizens of Taiwan.
“Treating Lee Ming-cheh as a mainland Chinese marks a major watershed,” said Hsiao I-Min, a lawyer at the Judicial Reform Foundation in Taiwan, who accompanied Mr. Lee’s wife from Taiwan to attend the trial.

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, was arrested in China and held for 23 days last year.

Mr. Lee’s case has added new strain in relations with Taiwan, which have soured since the election last year of a new president, Tsai Ing-wen. 

China has cut off official communications with Ms. Tsai’s government over her refusal to voice support for what Beijing calls the “1992 consensus,” which holds that the mainland and Taiwan are both part of the same China but leaves each side to interpret what that means.
In response to Mr. Lee’s legal odyssey, Ms. Tsai’s government has been relatively muted. 

“Our consistent position on this case is that we will do everything in our power to ensure his safe return while protecting the dignity of the nation,” said a spokesman for the presidential administration, Alex Huang.
China and Taiwan had in recent years cooperated on criminal investigations under a protocol that required each to notify the other in cases involving the arrests of its citizens. 

The Chinese government has recently abandoned such diplomatic niceties, officials in Taiwan say.
Taiwan’s government was notified of Mr. Lee’s arrest only when the public was — 10 days after his detainment in March near Macau, the former Portuguese colony that, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region of China with its own legal system.
Mr. Lee, 42, assumed enormous risk to make contact with rights campaigners inside China. 

A manager at Wenshan Community College in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, Mr. Lee volunteered for a rights organization called Covenants Watch and often traveled to the mainland.
Mr. Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu, learned his case had come to a head when a state-appointed lawyer contacted her this month. 

She only found out about his court appearance last week in Yueyang, in the southern province of Hunan, from news reports that circulated two days later, according to Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International.

Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Mr. Lee, departing for her husband’s trial in China from an airport in Taipei, Taiwan, this month. 

According to excerpts released by the Yueyang Intermediate People’s Court, Mr. Lee entered a guilty plea. 

He appeared with a Chinese co-defendant, Peng Yuhua, and together they were accused of trying to organize protests using the social media platforms WeChat and QQ, as well as Facebook, which is banned here.
Mr. Lee told the court that watching Chinese state television during his prolonged detention convinced him that he had been deceived by Taiwan’s free news media and was wrong about China’s political system. 

“These incorrect thoughts led me to criminal behavior,” he said.
Mr. Hsiao, the lawyer from Taiwan, said none of Mr. Lee’s acquaintances had heard of the co-defendant. 

Mr. Peng testified that together they had established chat groups online and formed a front organization, the Plum Blossom Company, with the aim of fomenting change. 

Mr. Hsiao said that no such company existed.
“He was a fake,” Mr. Hsiao said of Mr. Peng. 

“This guy does not really exist. He was playing a role.”
Ms. Lee, too, denounced her husband’s trial as a farce. 

“Today the world and I together witnessed political theater, as well as the differences between the core beliefs of Taiwan and China,” she said at her hotel in Yueyang, adding that the “norms of expression in Taiwan are tantamount to armed rebellion in China.”
Mr. Lee’s case has echoes of the fate of five booksellers in Hong Kong, four of whom who were spirited out of the semiautonomous city in the fall of 2015 after publishing gossipy material about Chinese political intrigues, which, while legal in Hong Kong, is not in China.
One bookseller, Lee Bo, is a British citizen. 

Another, Gui Minhai, is a naturalized Swedish citizen; he vanished from his seaside apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, in October 2015 and returned to China in a manner that has not been fully explained. 

He appeared on state television in January 2016 and said he had voluntarily returned to face punishment for a fatal car accident in 2003. 

He remains in prison.
“What happened to my father is a much larger issue,” Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui, who has been campaigning for his release, wrote in an email. 

“It shows that foreign citizens aren’t safe from Chinese state security, even when they are outside China’s borders. I find it strange that governments aren’t more worried about China’s new self-proclaimed role as world police.”

Perfidious Albion

Britain is looking away as China tramples on the freedom of Hong Kong – and my father

By Angela Gui

Angela Gui: ‘My father’s case is only one out of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong.’ 

Iam too young to remember the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its promise for the new world I would live in. 

But I have lived to see that promise trampled.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed to pave the way for the handover, was supposed to protect the people of Hong Kong from Chinese interference in their society and markets until 2047. 

Yet as the handover’s 20th anniversary approaches, China muscles in where it promised to tread lightly while Britain avoids eye contact.

Gui Minhai: the strange disappearance of a publisher who riled China's elite
As Xi Jinping has consolidated his grip on Chinese politics since he took office in 2013, Beijing has increasingly ignored the principle of “one country, two systems” on which the handover was based and actively eroded the freedoms this was supposed to guarantee.
In October 2015, my father Gui Minhai and his four colleagues were targeted and abducted by the agents of the Chinese Communist party for their work as booksellers and publishers. 

My father – a Swedish citizen – was taken while on holiday in Thailand, in the same place we’d spent Christmas together the year before. 

He was last seen getting into a car with a Mandarin-speaking man who had waited for him outside his holiday apartment. 

Next, his friend and colleague Lee Bo was abducted from the Hong Kong warehouse of Causeway Bay Books, which they ran together. 

Lee Bo is legally British and, like any Hong Konger, his freedom of expression should have been protected by the terms of 1997.
Their only “crime” had been to publish and sell books that were critical of the central Chinese government. 

So paranoid is Beijing about its public image, that it chooses to carry out cross-border kidnappings over some books. 

Causeway Bay Books specialised in publications that were banned on the mainland but legal in Hong Kong. 

The store’s manager, Lam Wing-kee, who was taken when travelling to Shenzhen, has described Causeway Bay Books “a symbol of resistance”. 

In spite of Hong Kong’s legal freedoms of speech and of the press the store is now closed because all its people have been abducted or bullied away. 

Other Hong Kong booksellers are picking “politically sensitive” titles off their shelves in the fear that they may be next; the next brief headline, the next gap in a family like my own.
I continue to live with my father’s absence – his image, messages from his friends, the cause he has become. 

Turning 53 this year, he spent a second birthday in a Chinese prison. 

Soon he will have spent two years in detention without access to a lawyer, Swedish consular officials, or regular contact with his family.
My father’s case is only one of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong. 

Earlier this year, Canadian businessman Xiao Jianhua – who had connections to the Chinese political elite – disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel and later resurfaced on the mainland. 

In last year’s legislative council elections, six candidates were barred from running because of their political stance. 

The two pro-independence candidates who did end up getting elected were prevented from taking office. 

If “intolerable political stance” is now a valid excuse for barring LegCo candidates, then it won’t be long before the entire Hong Kong government is reduced to a miniature version of China’s.
The Joint Declaration was meant to guarantee that no Hong Kong resident would have to fear a “midnight knock on the door”. 

The reality at present is that what happened to my father can happen to any Hong Kong resident the mainland authorities wish to silence or bring before their own system of “justice”. 

Twenty-one years ago, John Major pledged that Britain would continue to defend the freedoms granted to Hong Kong by the Joint Declaration against its autocratic neighbour. 

Today, instead of holding China to its agreement, Britain glances down at its shoes and mumbles about the importance of trade. 

It is as if the British government wants to forget all about the promise it made to the people of Hong Kong. 

But China’s crackdown on dissent has made it difficult for Hong Kongers to forget.
Theresa May often emphasises the importance of British values in her speeches. 

But Britain’s limpness over Hong Kong seems to demonstrate only how easily these values are compromised away. 

I worry about the global implications of China being allowed to just walk away from such an important treaty. 

And I worry that in the years to come, we will have many more Lee Bos and Gui Minhais, kidnapped and detained because their work facilitated free speech. 

Hong Kong’s last governor, Lord Patten, has repeatedly argued that human rights issues can be pushed without bad effects on trade. 

Germany, for example, has shown that this is entirely possible, with Angela Merkel often publicly criticising China’s human rights record. 

With a potentially hard Brexit around the bend, a much reduced Britain will need a world governed by the rule of law. 

How the government handles its responsibilities to Hong Kong will be decisive in shaping the international character of the country that a stand-alone Britain will become. 

I for one hope it will be a country that honours its commitments and that stands up to defend human rights.

Salman Rushdie leads World Human Rights Day protest for Chinese writers

Author joins 120 others including JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman denouncing ‘the enforced silence of these friends and colleagues’
By Sian Cain

A protester with tape on his mouth stands in front of a noose that reads: ‘Kidnapping’ during a protest on 10 January over the Causeway Bay booksellers’ disappearances.

Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman are among more than 120 authors and activists calling on Xi Jinping to reverse his government’s fierce crackdown on writers and dissidents.
The number of detained and imprisoned writers in China is among the highest in the world. 

In an open letter released by freedom of speech group PEN International, and published in the Guardian on World Human Rights Day, the signatories condemn the constriction of freedom of expression by Chinese authorities and say they “cannot stand by as more and more of our friends and colleagues are silenced”.
The letter, which is also signed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yann Martel, singles out the cases of several individuals, including Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who is serving 11 years in prison; Liu’s wife, the poet Liu Xia, who has lived under house arrest in Beijing since 2010 despite never being accused of a crime; Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who is currently serving a life sentence in prison; journalist Gao Yu, who is currently under house arrest after serving almost two years in prison; and Gui Minhai, one of the five booksellers and publishers who disappeared in late 2015 after the Causeway Bay Bookstore in Hong Kong was raided for selling sensitive titles about Chinese politicians.
While the other four men have since been released on bail, Gui, a Swedish citizen, has not been seen publicly since January when he made a brief, tearful “confession” on state television about a hit-and-run accident in 2003. 

Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui told the Guardian that the Swedish embassy had told her they had seen her father in Beijing in March.
The letter also calls for the release of imprisoned members of the Independent Chinese PEN centre. Three ICPC members were detained for praying to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, while seven other members are currently in prison, including former president of the ICPC Liu Xiaobo.
“The enforced silence of these friends and colleagues is deafening, and the disappearance of their voices has left a world worse off for this egregious injustice and loss,” the letter reads.
In June, ICPC members Lü Gengsong and Chen Shuqing were sentenced to more than 10 years each in prison, on charges of subversion for publishing pro-democracy essays on foreign websites, as well as promoting the banned Chinese Democratic Party. 

The two members were sentenced in Hangzhou, the eastern Chinese city that hosted the G20 in September. 

The harshness of their sentencing was attributed to a wider crackdown on writers and intellectuals in the lead-up to the global event. 

Since he came to power, Xi has overseen Operation Fox Hunt, repatriating Chinese fugitives abroad and bringing them to the mainland to face charges, usually of corruption.
“Today we call for their words to reverberate across the globe as we commit to fighting for their freedom until China heeds our call. On days like today, we have to reaffirm our refusal not to be complicit in their silence. We have to use our own words to give power to theirs,” the letter states. 

“China and the rest of the world can only be enriched by these opinions and voices. We therefore urge the Chinese authorities to release the writers, journalists, and activists who are languishing in jail or kept under house arrest for the crime of speaking freely and expressing their opinions.”

Salman Rushdie

Time for China to release writers, journalists and activists

Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti during his trial on separatism charges in Urumqi, Xinjiang region, in September 2014. He is currently serving a life sentence. 

Today, on World Human Rights Day, our Pen International community of writers, readers, activists and publishers condemn the Chinese authorities’ sustained and increasing attack on free expression and call for an immediate end to China’s worsening crackdown on fundamental human rights.
We cannot stand by as more and more of our friends and colleagues are silenced. 

Where is the voice of Ilham Tohti, the Uighur scholar and Pen member currently serving a life sentence, when his life’s work has been about creating peace and dialogue in China? 

Where is the voice of veteran journalist Gao Yu, who spent close to two years in prison and is now under house arrest? 

Where is the voice of publisher Gui Minhai, who disappeared from his holiday home in Thailand and is now being held incommunicado? 

Where is the voice of Nobel peace laureate and former president of the Independent Chinese Pen Centre, Liu Xiaobo, serving an 11-year prison sentence and the voice of his wife, the poet Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest for over six years without even having been accused of a crime?
These writers represent the many critical voices across China currently being silenced, including the imprisoned and persecuted members of the Independent Chinese Pen Centre: Yang Tongyan, Zhu Yufu, Lü Gengsong, Chen Shuqing, Hu Shigen, Qin Yongmin, Liu Yanli and Liu Feiyue; and honorary members Zhang Haitao, Sun Feng, Lu Yuyu, Li Tingyu, Huang Qi and Su Changlan. 

The enforced silence of these friends and colleagues is deafening, and the disappearance of their voices has left a world worse off for this egregious injustice and loss.
Today we call for their words to reverberate across the globe as we commit to fighting for their freedom until China heeds our call. 

On days like today we have to reaffirm our refusal not to be complicit in their silence. 

We have to use our own words to give power to theirs.
China and the rest of the world can only be enriched by these opinions and voices. 

We therefore urge the Chinese authorities to release the writers, journalists and activists who are languishing in jail or kept under house arrest for the crime of speaking freely and expressing their opinions.
We urge them to uphold freedom of expression and all human rights.

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