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.

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.

Chinese State Hooliganism

EU, Sweden call for China to release detained publisher
AP

In this June 18, 2016, file photo, freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee stands next to a placard with picture of missing bookseller Gui Minhai, in front of his book store in Hong Kong as the protesters are marching to the Chinese central government's liaison office. Gui, who was secretly detained in China has been taken away by Chinese authorities again after being released into house arrest last October, his daughter said Monday, Jan. 22, 2018. 

BEIJING— The European Union on Wednesday joined Sweden in calling on China to immediately release a Swedish book publisher who was taken off a train in front of his country's diplomats by Chinese police four days ago.
The Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday indicated Gui Minhai, the Hong Kong-based book publisher, and the Swedish diplomats who were with him may have been breaking Chinese law.
Gui was first abducted in 2015, one of five Hong Kong booksellers whose disappearances became a symbol of the extent to which China was willing to reinforce its hard line on squelching political dissent and a free press — despite international criticism.
The office of EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said it "fully supports the public statement and efforts of the Swedish government" on Gui's behalf.
"We expect the Chinese authorities to immediately release Mr. Gui from detention, allow him to reunite with his family and to receive consular and medical support in line with his rights," it said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallstrom said in a news release that China has given no clear explanation for Gui's detention. 

Sweden has already summoned China's ambassador in the Scandinavian country over the 53-year-old's case.
"We take a very serious view of the detention on Saturday of Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, with no specific reason being given for the detention, which took place during an ongoing consular support mission," Wallstrom said in her statement.
"We expect the immediate release of our fellow citizen, and that he be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff," she said.
Wallstrom said the Swedish diplomats accompanying Gui had been "providing consular assistance to a Swedish citizen in need of medical care.
"This was perfectly in line with basic international rules giving us the right to provide our citizens with consular support," she said.
Gui had been running a Hong Kong publishing company specializing in tales about high-level Chinese politics when he disappeared from his Thai holiday home about two years ago. 

He had been spirited away by Chinese security agents to mainland China, where he later turned up in police custody. 

In a videotaped confession that was coerced, Gui stated that he'd turned himself in to mainland authorities over a hit-and-run accident.
He was released into house arrest in October in the eastern city of Ningbo, living in what his daughter Angela called a police-managed apartment.
His daughter told Radio Sweden, the English-language service of national broadcaster Sveriges Radio, that her father was on a train with two Swedish diplomats on Saturday when a group of police officers seized him.
She said her father was traveling to Beijing to see a Swedish doctor after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurological disease that he developed while in custody.
Gui's 2015 abduction reinforced rising fears that Beijing was chipping away at the rule of law in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city that is promised civil liberties such as freedom of speech until 2047.
The books Gui and his colleagues sold at their Causeway Bay Bookshop were popular with visitors from mainland China, where such titles are banned.

Chinese authorities have a history of continuing to persecute political prisoners even after their release from prison and other legal strictures.
Noted human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng recently disappeared back into custody after five years of prison and three more years confined by guards at home. 

Liu Xia, the wife of the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been held a virtual prisoner for years despite never being charged.
Since her husband's death in July while serving a prison sentence, Liu has had virtually no contact with friends or family and the authorities will not say where she is currently being held.

Chinese State Hooliganism

Maritime Law Violator China Wants Other Countries To Sail Above Sea In Its Waters
By Terrell Jermaine Starr
In this Aug. 28, 2014 photo, fishermen look at a Chinese nuclear submarine sails past Yalong Bay in Sanya, south China’s Hainan Province. Several Asian nations are arming up, their wary eyes fixed squarely on one country: a resurgent China that’s boldly asserting its territorial claims all along the East Asian coast. The scramble to spend more defense dollars comes amid spats with China over contested reefs and waters. Other Asian countries such as India and South Korea are quickly modernizing their forces, although their disputes with China have stayed largely at the diplomatic level.

China is mulling a new law that would require submersive naval vehicles to travel above surface and report its movements to authorities and report their movements to government authorities. 

In other words, it’s asking submarines not to act like submarines, which is hilarious coming from a habitual maritime law violator like China.
Here’s an excerpt from the draft of the proposed rule changes, via Reuters: Foreign submersibles, passing though (sic) territorial waters of the People’s Republic of China, should travel on the surface, raise their national flag, and report to Chinese maritime management administrations,” the news service cited the draft revision as saying, without giving details.
The draft makes no mention of the South China Sea, but that it is almost certainly the reason why Beijing is seeking these changes. 

Washington and Beijing spared briefly in December when the Chinese Navy seized a U.S. Navy drone that was actually nothing more than an ocean glider, as Foxtrot Alpha reported at the time; China eventually gave it back.
The comical part about this rule revision is that China is hardly a nation that respects maritime law. We have reported extensively on China’s artificial island buildup in the disputed territory that the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, and Japan have also laid claim to. 

These smaller nations have also complained for decades that China has used its military might to bully its influence over the sea.
Last summer, an international tribunal at the Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines’ territory dispute against China and rejected Beijing’s claim of "historical" rights to the sea, ruling its actions have caused environmental damage, and endangered the Philippine’s ships and fishing and oil exploration.
Here is a breakdown of that ruling, per the New York Times:
The main issue before the panel was the legality of China’s claim to waters within a “nine-dash line” that appears on official Chinese maps and encircles as much as 90 percent of the South China Sea, an area the size of Mexico. 

The Philippines had asked the tribunal to find the claim to be in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which both China and the Philippines have ratified.
In its decision, the tribunal said any historic rights to the sea that China had previously enjoyed “were extinguished” by the treaty, which lays out rules for drawing zones of control over the world’s oceans based on distances to coastlines. 

The panel added that while China had used islands in the sea in the past, it had never exercised exclusive authority over the waters.
The panel also concluded that several disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea were too small for China to claim control of economic activities in the waters around them. 

As a result, it found, China was engaged in unlawful behavior in Philippine waters, including activities that had aggravated the dispute.
The tribunal cited China’s construction of a large artificial island on an atoll known as Mischief Reef. China has built a military airstrip, naval berths and sports fields on the island, but the tribunal ruled that it was in Philippine waters.
China vowed to ignore it and they clearly have been.
Of course, it is one thing if China is making its maritime revisions to counter the America’s naval influence in the area, which is totally reasonable. 

China is the world power in that area; they’re within their rights to not have the U.S. encroach on their territory. 

But when it comes to smaller nations like the Philippines, or Vietnam? 

Come on.
You would think Beijing would at least honor its neighbors’ maritime borders by not building islands inside of them before hypocritically asking that other nations respect its boundaries. 

But that seems like it may be asking the Chinese a tad bit too much.