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.”

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 Terrrorism

China detained bookseller Gui Minhai to stop him from telling his story
By Oliver Chou, Mimi Lau and Catherine Wong

China snatched a Swedish citizen and former Hong Kong-based bookseller to prevent him from telling his story before a trial over his alleged involvement in “illegal book trading” wraps up, his former employer said, citing a source.
Publisher Lau Tat-man, founder and chief editor of Ha Fai Yi Publication, where Gui Minhai was a freelance writer and editor for seven years, believes Gui’s dramatic arrest on Saturday at a train station near Beijing – under the watch of Swedish diplomatic staff – was a bid to stop him from leaving the country.
“The case of Causeway Bay Books has yet to be settled in an official trial, so Gui heading towards Beijing with Swedish diplomats could have been part a plan to get him out of the country,” Lau, citing a reliable source, told the South China Morning Post.
Gui was one of five people who went missing from 2015, all of whom were associated with the bookshop that released titles critical of Beijing. 

Gui was in Thailand when he disappeared for the first time, then resurfaced in custody across the border. 

He was freed from prison in October on a drink-driving charge.
Lau could not confirm whether Gui was released on the condition that he stay within the city of Ningbo, in Zhejiang, but he said “I’m sure there are conditions attached to his release”.
“Gui has stayed low-profile since his release in October and the only person he’s had contact with is a long-time acquaintance in Shanghai,” he said.
The European Union joined Sweden’s call on Wednesday for the immediate release of Gui, which Beijing said was “unreasonable”.
The missing booksellers case made international headlines at the time, and although not much had been heard about the booksellers recently until Gui was taken away on Saturday, Lau said the authorities had continued to keep him under tight surveillance.
“Lee Po has stayed quiet and Lui Por and Cheung Chi-ping are in their Shenzhen homes and are not free to travel – that shows the officials are still worried that these people will speak out like Lam Wing-kee did once they are set free,” he said, referring to the bookstore manager who revealed details of his detention on the mainland when he returned to Hong Kong.
Lau called on the Swedish government to take the lead for the West and stand firm on international law and human rights.
“Many Western countries have kowtowed to China because of economic gains – it’s time for the West to wake up,” he said.

Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström said on Tuesday that Gui “was at the time of his arrest in the company of diplomatic staff, who were providing consular help 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 in a statement.
“The Chinese authorities have assured us on numerous occasions that Mr Gui Minhai has been free since his release having served a sentence for a traffic-related offence, and that we can have any contact we wish with our fellow citizen.”
In Beijing on Wednesday, the European Union’s ambassador to China Hans Dietmar Schweisgut said the EU “fully supports” Sweden’s efforts to resolve the issue with China, Reuters reported.

Magnus Fiskesjö, an associate professor at Cornell University who was a Swedish diplomat in Beijing and has known Gui since the 1980s, said the incident was “not only wrong but also damaging to China’s international image”.
“When China disrespects our country by mistreating a citizen of ours, we have to stand up for our citizen – there is no other option for it,” he said.
“It has outraged people and goes beyond the bounds of international law in a repeated and offensive manner. When people hear about this news in Sweden, they feel that this is China bullying a small country like us.”
Fiskesjö said the Swedish embassy and consulates in China had sought access to Gui since 2015 on multiple occasions since he was first detained but “with long delays and long waits”.

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.”

Rogue Nation: Where is Bookseller China ‘Released’?

The Chinese government has a history of lying about the condition of its political prisoners. 
www.hrw.org

Gui Minhai, the Swedish bookseller who was forcibly disappeared by the Chinese government in October 2015. 

Two years after Swedish national Gui Minhai vanished in Thailand on October 17, 2015, his whereabouts remain a mystery. 

Last week the Chinese government—which abducted Gui outside its borders and has detained him in China—told Swedish diplomats that Gui has been “released” after serving his sentence for an alleged traffic offense. 

Yet the Swedish authorities have not seen him, nor has his family. 

Gui may indeed have been freed – but until he is accounted for he remains forcibly disappeared.
Days after Gui’s “release,” a man claiming to be Gui called the Swedish Consulate in Shanghai, saying he would get in touch with them later because he wished to be with his sick mother. 

But Gui’s daughter says her grandmother is not ill, nor has she seen him.
Gui Minhai is the last of the five booksellers from Hong Kong Mighty Current Media who were abducted and detained in 2015 still missing. 

 One bookseller, Lam Wing-kee, revealed after his release that he was secretly detained and interrogated about the workings of the store, which sold books on the private lives of China’s top leaders.
The Chinese government has a history of lying about the condition of its political prisoners.

It claims that Liu Xia, the wife of late Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, is free, when the available information indicates otherwise. 

Twenty years after it took into custody the 6-year-old Panchen Lama—Tibet’s second most important religious figure—Beijing insists that he is “living a normal life.” 

Yet nobody else has seen or heard from him.
Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallström, tweeted this week that she welcomed the news of Gui’s release. 

But until Swedish authorities can fully ascertain that Gui has been unconditionally released—­that means a private visit—they should assume he remains disappeared and raise the matter directly with senior Chinese officials and in international forums.
This case has implications beyond one person’s freedom. 

The Chinese government has not only violated Gui Minhai’s fundamental human rights – it has done so across international borders. 

This should be a matter of grave concern not only for Sweden, but for all countries that care about the security of their citizens.

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."