China’s Thug Diplomacy

Calls for China’s thug ambassador to be thrown out of Sweden 

• Gui Congyou lashed out at local media in an interview on the weekend, saying they ‘have a habit of criticising, accusing and smearing China’
• He has been summoned for a meeting at the foreign ministry on Tuesday, and three Swedish parties have called for him to be expelled.

Bloomberg

China's thug diplomat Gui Congyou has repeatedly angered Swedish lawmakers with his remarks since he became China’s ambassador to the country in 2017. 

Sweden’s government has demanded a meeting with the ambassador for China after he lambasted Swedish media.
Thug ambassador Gui Congyou caused a diplomatic furore over the weekend after giving an interview to Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT, in which he said that some local media representatives “have a habit of criticising, accusing and smearing China”.
He went on to compare the relationship between Swedish media and China to one in which “a 48kg weight boxer keeps challenging an 86kg weight boxer to a fight”.
Three parties in Sweden’s parliament have now called for Gui to be thrown out of the Nordic country, adding to tensions ahead of a meeting scheduled to take place with the ambassador at the foreign ministry in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has already ruled out the option of expelling Gui.

But she also made clear Sweden would not accept veiled threats from China.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has ruled out expelling China’s ambassador. 

Relations between the two countries have soured recently over jailed Chinese-born Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, who was honoured last year by the Swedish chapter of PEN International with its annual Tucholsky Prize.
Gui Minhai, who has written several books that are critical of China’s leadership, has been detained since late 2015 by Chinese authorities, who accuse him of crimes including “operating an illegal business”.

Gui Congyou says Minhai is a “lie-fabricator” who “committed serious offences in both China and Sweden”. 

He also said Swedish media “is full of lies” about the case and that the Tucholsky Prize, which was handed out by Sweden’s minister of culture, would result in Chinese “countermeasures”.

Gui Minhai has been detained since late 2015 by Chinese authorities. 

The spat comes amid a more assertive diplomatic stance from China, which dominates global export markets and is one of Sweden’s most important trade partners. 

In neighbouring Norway, the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 to Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo led to a deep-freeze of diplomatic relations that lasted more than half a decade and hurt trade. 

In 2018, Sweden exported goods and services to China worth 67 billion kronor (US$7 billion), making it the Nordic country’s eighth-largest export market.
Gui Congyou, who was appointed ambassador to Sweden in 2017, has repeatedly angered lawmakers in the country with his remarks over the years. 

Commenting on Swedish media’s coverage of Gui Minhai, Gui Congyou in December cited a Chinese proverb: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but we have shotguns for our enemies.”
The ambassador’s latest remarks prompted the Sweden Democrats as well as the Christian Democrats and the Left Party to demand that he be thrown out.

Freedom Fighter

Sweden honors detained political writer Gui Minhai

AFP-JIJI

Sweden's Culture Minister Amanda Lind awarded the prize. 

Sweden's culture minister Amanda Lind on Friday defied a Chinese threat of "counter-measures" by awarding a Swedish rights prize to detained Chinese-Swedish book publisher Gui Minhai.
Known for publishing titles about Chinese political leaders out of a Hong Kong book shop, Gui disappeared while on holiday in Thailand in 2015 before resurfacing in mainland China several months later.The Swedish section of free speech organisation PEN International gave its Tucholsky Prize to the 55-year-old Gui, a Chinese-born Swedish citizen currently in detention at an unknown location in China.

"China resolutely opposes Swedish PEN awarding a criminal and lie-fabricator," China's ambassador to Sweden said in remarks published in English on the embassy website.

Swedish PEN's Tucholsky Prize is for a writer or publisher being persecuted, threatened or in exile from his or her country.

In spite of China's threats, Swedish Culture and Democracy Minister Amanda Lind attended the ceremony.
"Those in power should never take the liberty to attack free artistic expression or free speech," Lind said while presenting the award in Stockholm. 

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven stressed earlier in the day that the Scandinavian country would not back down.
"We are not going to give in to this type of threat. Never. We have freedom of expression in Sweden and that's how it is, period," Lofven told Swedish Television.

Strained ties
Lind had earlier called Beijing's threat "serious".
"We have made it clear to China's representatives that we stand by our position that Gui Minhai must be released and that we have freedom of expression in Sweden," Lind told TT.
"This means that Swedish PEN must, of course, be allowed to award this prize to whoever they want, free of any influence. And as culture and democracy minister it is natural for me to attend the award ceremony," she said.
Relations between Sweden and China have been strained for several years over Gui Minhai's detention. 

He has appeared on Chinese state television confessing to a fatal drink-driving accident from more than a decade earlier.
He served two years in prison, but three months after his October 2017 release he was again arrested while on a train to Beijing, travelling with Swedish diplomats.
His supporters and family have claimed his detention is part of a political repression campaign orchestrated by Chinese authorities.

The Tucholsky Prize, named after German writer Kurt Tucholsky, who came to Sweden in the early 1930s as a refugee from Nazi Germany, is worth 150,000 kronor (14,000 euros, $15,500).
The prize, established in 1984, has been previously won by Adam Zagajevski, Nuruddin Farah, Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin and Svetlana Alexievich, among others.

Chinazism: State Terrorism

'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over East Turkestan protests
Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing
By Benjamin Haas in Munich

Demonstrators holding Uighur flags in Berlin before a meeting between German chancellor Angela Merkel and Li Keqiang. 

Two days after Abdujelil Emet sat in the public gallery of Germany’s parliament during a hearing on human rights, he received a phone call from his sister for the first time in three years. 

But the call from East Turkestan, in western China, was anything but a joyous family chat. 

It was made at the direction of Chinese security officers, part of a campaign by Beijing to silence criticism of policies that have seen more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in concentration camps.
Emet’s sister began by praising the Communist party and making claims of a much improved life under its guidance before delivering a shock: his brother had died a year earlier. 

But Emet, 54, was suspicious from the start; he had never given his family his phone number. 

Amid the heartbreaking news and sloganeering, he could hear a flurry of whispers in the background, and he demanded to speak to the unknown voice. 

Moments later the phone was handed to a Chinese official who refused to identify himself.
By the end of the conversation, the façade constructed by the Chinese security agent was broken and Emet’s sister wept as she begged him to stop his activism. 

Then the Chinese official took the phone again with a final warning.
“You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. 

“You need to think of their safety.”
In interviews with more than two dozen Uighurs living across Europe and the United States, tales of threats across the world are the rule, not the exception. 

Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France all complained of similar threats against family members back in East Turkestan, and some were asked to spy for China.
More than a million Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic ethnic group, and other minorities are being held in concentration camps, according to the UN, with some estimates saying the number is “closer to 3 million”.
Emet, originally from Aksu in East Turkestan, has lived in Germany for over two decades and is a naturalised citizen. 

He does volunteer work for the World Uyghur Congress and is a part-time imam in his community. He has never told his family about his activism, hoping the omission would protect them.
“I will not keep my silence and the Chinese government should not use my family to threaten me,” Emet said. 

“I was clear with them on the phone: if they harm my family, I will speak out louder and become a bigger problem for the government.”

‘China threatening people in Germany should never become normalised’
Most Uighurs remain silent, and have found little help from European authorities. 

But Margarete Bause, a member of the German parliament representing Munich, said Chinese interference was unacceptable and urged Uighurs to contact their MPs.
“We need to protect visitors to the Bundestag. Observing parliament is a fundamental right in any democracy,” she said. 

“It’s also important for the German public to know how China is trying to exert influence here. The Chinese government threatening people in Germany should never become normalised.”
Bause has been interested in Uighur issues for over a decade, after she was admonished by Chinese diplomats in 2006 for attending an event hosted by the World Uyghur Congress. 

In August she was denied a visa as part of a parliamentary visit to China and the trip was eventually cancelled in response.
Beyond discouraging activism, Chinese officials have also tried to recruit Uighurs living abroad to spy on others in their community, asking for photos of private gatherings, names, phone numbers, addresses and licence plate numbers. 

Some are recruited when they go to Chinese diplomatic missions in Europe to request documents, and others are contacted by security agents over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. 

Emet’s number is likely to have been leaked to Chinese security agents this way, he said, with his number well known in the Uighur community in Munich.
Chinese agents offer cash, the promise of visas to visit East Turkestan or better treatment for family members as a reward, but also dangle the threat of harsh consequences for those same family members if their offers are refused. 

Uighurs described having crucial documents withheld from Chinese embassies and consulates unless they agreed.
One Uighur living in Germany who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said a Chinese agent asked for photos of Eid and other celebrations, and specifically asked for information on Uighurs who had recently arrived in Europe.

A group of people stage a protest against China’s human rights violations against members of the Turkic Uighur minority.

The recent surge in activism among Uighurs overseas is mostly a direct response to the increasingly repressive policies in East Turkestan, and as more people speak out China has doubled efforts to silence them and control the narrative over what it calls “re-education camps”.
There are some signs China’s campaign to silence Uighurs in Europe is working. 

Gulhumar Haitiwaji became an outspoken critic of policies after her mother disappeared into one of the camps in East Turkestan, appearing on French television and starting a petition addressed to French president Emmanuel Macron that garnered nearly half a million signatures. 

But after threats from Chinese officials targeting her mother, Haitiwaji cancelled a planned appearance in March at a human rights summit in Geneva, according to two sources familiar with her plans. 

Haitiwaji and the organisers of the meeting did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who focuses on East Turkestan, said European governments needed to do more to protect their citizens from Chinese intimidation.
“The biggest mistake European Union countries make is that once they allow China to get away with something, that emboldens Beijing,” he said. 

“China has systematic strategies in place and the threats to Uighurs in exile show that. Europe needs its own unified strategy to stand up to China and respond to these threats.”
The Chinese embassy in Berlin did not respond to requests for comment.

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.

They Escaped China’s Crackdown, but Now Wait in Limbo

By Christina Anderson and Chris Buckley
Abdikadir Yasin, a Uighur Muslim from China seeking asylum in Sweden, with his wife and one of their children in emergency housing in the city of Gävle.

GAVLE, Sweden — Abdikadir Yasin and his wife waited for months, dreading a call telling them they would have to leave Sweden and return to western China, where the government has corralled hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs like them into re-education camps.
The couple had joined an outflow of Uighurs from the Chinese colony of East Turkestan three years ago, when China’s clampdown on the minority group was intensifying.
They ended up in Sweden, where their asylum request was rejected, leaving them in fear of being deported and ending up in the camps.
Fleeing Uighurs have struggled to win acceptance and asylum in a world where the restrictions on them in China — including omnipresent surveillance and arbitrary detention — have won little attention until recently.
They face an array of pressures from the Chinese authorities and from host countries, some of which, like Sweden, have already taken in many people fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“As long as you are a Uighur, it’s just a matter of time before you end up in a situation like this,” Mr. Yasin said in Gavle, a small city north of Stockholm that is the latest stop on their journey.
“Today it was me.”
This sense of precarious invisibility is often felt among the million or more Uighurs living beyond China’s borders, especially those who left in recent years.
Beijing’s rising influence has raised the risks of their being forced back to China.

Sweden denied Mr. Yasin’s family the right to stay, though they later won a reprieve from deportation. “The staff didn’t understand China,” Mr. Yasin said.

China has called them illegal migrants and dangerous extremists, although very few have headed toward trouble spots in the Middle East.
It has pressured and cajoled neighboring countries to return Uighurs who are caught without travel permits.
And increasingly since last year, the Chinese authorities have directly pressed Uighurs to return from abroad, contacting them over messaging apps or threatening their families in East Turkestan.
Since last year, the expansion of the indoctrination camps, which are designed to sever the attachment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to their religion and culture, has drawn an international chorus of criticism.
The Chinese government recently tried to blunt that criticism by presenting the camps as "comfortable job training centers".
Mr. Yasin and his lawyers said the Swedish officials who considered the family’s applications for refugee status seemed unsure about threats waiting for them in East Turkestan, which is the homeland of 11 million Uighurs.
Despite statements from lawyers that Mr. Yasin was likely to be detained if sent to China, the Swedish Migration Agency ruled that he did not qualify for asylum, he said.
“They didn’t believe that in East Turkestan there were so many problems for Uighurs,” Mr. Yasin said.
“The staff didn’t understand China.”
Tens of thousands of Uighurs left China over a period of years before a crackdown choked off the departures, leaders of the exile community say.
Many settled in Central Asian countries and in Turkey, others in Arab countries.
Some have tried to make it to the United States and other Western countries, which they hoped would offer more security.
But Uighur migrants often live in limbo, unsure of how long they can stay in their host country, fearful of returning to China and constantly worried about family members back home.
Many Uighurs must exploit loopholes and gray zones to get the passports and visas needed to go abroad.
Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, with his children at his home in Istanbul. The family sought refuge in Turkey after Mr. Muhemet was released from one of China’s indoctrination camps for Uighurs and other Muslims.

“Diaspora leaders have been frustrated with the lack of interest in the Uighur issue in general, but are particularly sensitive about Western governments and their lack of interest,” Işık Kuşçu-Bonnenfant, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey who studies Uighur migrants, said by email.
Only recently, she said, have diaspora leaders “been able to use the detention camp issue effectively to raise awareness among Western governments.”
Until a few years ago, Mr. Yasin and his wife had, like many urban, middle-class Uighurs, adapted to the ways of China and its vast Han ethnic majority.
Most Uighurs are Sunni Muslim, and their language and culture have much more in common with those of peoples across Central Asia and Turkey than with the Han’s.
Mr. Yasin, 36, learned Chinese and tried to stay aloof from politics, making a living selling cars in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan.
His wife, 30, was a preschool teacher who also ran a textile shop.
In the 2000s, China suffered a string of attacks which the government said were perpetrated by Uighur separatists backed from abroad.
In 2009, a spasm of deadly ethnic conflict rocked Urumqi.
The police tried to snuff out protests by Uighurs; tensions boiled over into anti-Chinese killings and counterattacks on Uighurs.
Even relatively wealthy, middle-class Uighurs who kept away from protests and political causes faced intensifying suspicion.
“Urbanized Uighurs I spoke to seemed to lose hope of a future in China due to economic discrimination and racial profiling,” said Henryk Szadziewski, a researcher with the Uyghur Human Rights Project, based in Washington. (Uyghur is an alternate spelling.)
“This subpopulation of Uighurs had the means to bribe officials in East Turkestan and obtain the visas and paperwork required to make the move.”
Mr. Yasin’s troubles began in 2015, when neighbors recruited him as their leader in a dispute over compensation for demolished homes, he said.
As the dispute heated up, the police detained Mr. Yasin.
Officers stunned him with an electric prod and forced him and other residents to sign documents admitting to offenses, he said.
He was detained again after he tried to publicize the dispute on social media and by contacting journalists.
This time, he said, he was beaten and tortured, then sent to a hospital to recover.
While he was there, relatives made preparations to spirit him out of China along with his wife and infant daughter.
The family caught a plane to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, where they spent a month, then flew to Russia and finally on to Stockholm, where they applied for asylum in May 2015.
After nearly two years and an appeal, the couple were formally denied the right to stay.
The Swedish Migration Agency accepted that Mr. Yasin was Uighur, but it did not believe his account of his escape, said Fedja Ziga, a lawyer who represented the couple and said he found their explanations to be consistent and reasonable.
After being denied, Mr. Yasin and his family slipped into Germany to seek asylum there.
But after a year of waiting, they were sent back to Sweden under a European Union rule that says people can apply in only one country.
At the Stockholm airport, waiting officials told them to find their way to Gavle, two hours away. They spent a first night there huddled on a bench.
The grinding fear has taken its toll on Mr. Yasin and his family, especially his wife, who did not want her name reported.
She had been pregnant with their third child but suffered a miscarriage in late September.

Chinese security personnel in the city of Kashgar, in the western colony of East Turkestan. Uighurs in East Turkestan have been subjected to surveillance and crackdowns on religious life, as well as the vast detention program.

“This case must be seen in the context of the extremely overstrained Swedish Migration Agency, given the large influx of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East,” said Jojje Olsson, a Swedish journalist based in Taiwan, who first reported on Mr. Yasin’s case.
“China is neither widely reported nor discussed in Sweden, which leads to a big information gap.”
Sweden has deported Uighurs before.
In 2012, a Uighur man and woman who had sought asylum there were sent to China after their applications were rejected, Radio Free Asia reported.
In other parts of the world, deportation is more common.
The World Uyghur Congress, an exile organization, counted 317 cases of Uighurs being sent back to China in the 20 years up to 2017.
Peter Irwin, a project manager for the congress, said there had been at least 23 deportations since then, including a man sent back by Germany as result of a bureaucratic foul-up.
But the pressures from the Chinese authorities on Uighurs abroad are also increasing.
Many Uighurs are traveling on Chinese passports, and growing numbers of those passports will expire in the coming years, forcing some Uighurs to choose between returning to China or, in effect, living as stateless exiles.
“If we have a child, my child cannot get Chinese citizenship, because China refuses to give a passport, and Turkey is not going to give me passports,” said Guli, a Uighur student living in Turkey. She asked that her family name not be used, fearing that her family in East Turkestan could suffer for her speaking out.
“Our next generation will have big problems if she or he cannot get any citizenship from any country.”
Last month, Mr. Yasin and his family won a reprieve from deportation.
Amid rising attention on the crackdown in East Turkestan and on their case, the Swedish Migration Agency said it would stop repatriating any Uighurs and other minorities from that region.
But the family still feels anxious.
The couple and their two children are living in an emergency housing facility off a highway, with fast-food drive-ins and gas stations as their closest neighbors.
Winning the right to stay in Sweden is still uncertain.
“We don’t feel safe yet,” Mr. Yasin’s wife said.
“I watch the news, so I feel very glad when I see that people are starting to understand what is happening there.”

Chinese aggressions in Europe have a name: broken porcelain

Beijing’s message to Sweden and beyond – criticise us, and we’ll topple your agenda – won’t win it any hearts and minds

By David Bandurski

Screengrab from the ‘video that purported to show the ‘brutal treatment’ of three Chinese tourists at a hotel in Stockholm’. 

Two days after Sweden’s election in September, a bizarre statement appeared in English on the website of the Chinese embassy in Stockholm. 

A “small handful of Swedish forces, media and individuals”, it said, had made “unwarranted claims” of Chinese interference in the Swedish vote. 

These were “groundless accusations”, and a “malicious attack and smear against China”. 

The strangest thing of all: no one in Sweden  had the slightest inkling what the statement referred to.

Beijing protests Swedish TV satire about barbaric Chinese tourists
As an expert on China’s official discourse who also studies its influence in Europe, I too struggled to make sense of this storm in a teapot – until a few days later, when a new tempest whirled into view. This time, Sweden noticed. 

The source of the fresh controversy was an online video that purported to show the “brutal treatment” of three Chinese tourists at a hotel in Stockholm. 

As I read the "angry" comments from China’s foreign ministry, it suddenly all made perfect sense. 

The expressions of "outrage" were part of a concerted diplomatic strategy of hyperbole and distraction.
In the video, the tourists – identified as Zeng and his two parents – are carried from the hotel by police officers, and deposited on the pavement outside as the son screams in English: “This is killing! This is killing!” 

The mother sits on the pavement and wails: “Save me!” 

According to a local newspaper, Aftonbladet, the tourists had arrived at the hotel the night before their scheduled booking and asked to remain in the lobby through the night. 

They disregarded repeated requests to leave, remaining instead on the lobby sofas. 

One eyewitness said the police remained calm as the Chinese family grew agitated. 

The son, this source said, acted particularly oddly, “throwing himself flat on the ground”. 

Quoted by local media, a Swedish prosecutor later said: “We made the assessment that no crime on the part of the police had been committed.”
The Chinese embassy, in a statement on 15 September, insisted that the tourists had been “brutally abused by the Swedish police”, which had “severely endangered the life and violated the basic human rights of Chinese citizens”.
Many Chinese people who viewed the video clips on domestic social media platforms were furious about what they saw as mistreatment. 

But others saw something different: a familiar pattern of using over-dramatisation as a means of recourse for imagined injustice. 

Called “porcelain bumping”, or pengci, this pattern became a focus of attention as the hubbub over the Stockholm incident continued in China. 

Pengci refers to the practice of manufacturing drama to obtain a desired outcome. 

The term was coined to describe a technique used by fraudsters who would wait with delicate porcelain vessels outside busy markets and demand payment when these shattered, ostensibly due to the carelessness of others. 

Now, pengci often refers to the act of throwing oneself into oncoming traffic in order to claim compensation – a practice so common in China that related compilations of clips online are now nearly as ubiquitous as cat videos.
Still, the Chinese embassy in Sweden continued to depict the incident as a grave case of human rights abuse. 

The foreign ministry’s position was parroted by state-run media. 

One article shared by a social media account of the People’s Daily alleged that talk of “porcelain bumping”, and other attempts to minimise the Stockholm incident, had been cooked up overseas by Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that the Chinese government has labelled an enemy.
At this point official Chinese outrage had moved on to a skit aired on 21 September on a satirical show by the Swedish national broadcaster, SVT, that made light of the incident. 

A statement from the Chinese embassy said the skit had “breached the basic moral bottom line of humankind”. 

Moreover, it had “seriously infringed on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity” by projecting a map behind the host that did not show Taiwan and Tibet as an integral part of China.
This came at an already tense time in the bilateral relationship. 

The Dalai Lama had visited Sweden just days before the video of the tourists appeared. 

Another sore point was China’s continued imprisonment of a Hong Kong-based bookseller, Gui Minhai, who is a Swedish citizen. 

Oscar Almén, a researcher at Uppsala University, told Radio Sweden: “The Chinese embassy is now actively trying to deliver a message to the Swedish media and the public.”
That message is a solemn promise to government and society in Europe and beyond: wherever you seek to criticise our policies or forestall our ambitions, we will topple your agenda. We will shatter the porcelain of diplomatic composure and fan the anger of our population with debased facts until every issue you raise is about just one issue – China’s national "dignity".
Earlier this month “broken porcelain” diplomacy moved on to the British Conservative party’s annual conference in Birmingham, as a journalist from state-owned China Central Television shouted down a panellist at an event on Hong Kong organised by the party’s human rights committee, which was attended by prominent members of the pro-democracy community in Hong Kong. 

As the woman was confronted and asked to leave, she apparently slapped a student volunteer. 

She shouted, “How democratic [is the] UK!” as she was being escorted out.
The Chinese embassy in London demanded an apology. 

And while it made a fuss about the reporter’s rights, it also pointed out, in a statement, that “any plot or action conspiring to divide China is contrary to the current of history”. 

Discussion of Hong Kong’s future, in other words, was to be avoided.
The pattern is clear. 

When it comes to foreign criticism of the Chinese government, or to the strategic issues it cares about, we’re all tiptoeing through a china shop now. 

The danger is that such histrionics could make European governments, universities, scholars and journalists, to remain silent, retreat from issues likely to prompt an outburst. 

Europe must send a message that it welcomes free, open and calm discussion of all issues, and that it will not suspend its values or the rights of its citizens to appease China’s official bouts of staged anger. 

If we refuse to indulge such tactics, China’s government will eventually come to understand what many of its citizens already know – that you don’t win hearts or minds through intimidation.

Rogue Travelers

Swedish Police Ejects Chinese Tourists Trying To Check In A Day Early and Refusing To Leave

By Mike Ives

HONG KONG — The latest diplomatic incident between China and Sweden was born in, of all places, the lobby of a hostel.
Earlier this month, a Chinese man named Zeng and his parents arrived at the Generator hostel in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, the state-run media in China reported. 

t was just after midnight, and he asked if his parents could wait in the lobby until check-in opened later that day.
But Zeng said the hostel staff members called police officers, who forcibly removed the family and dropped them near a cemetery outside town, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.
“I could not imagine this happening in any modern country, especially Sweden, the hometown of the Nobel Prize,” he was quoted as saying by Global Times.
Over the weekend, nearly two weeks after the tourists’ removal, the Chinese Embassy said in a statement that the three had been “brutally abused by the Swedish police.” 

The statement came a day after the embassy issued a safety alert for Chinese travelers in Sweden — one of the safest countries on earth.
The incident, which comes eight months after the Chinese authorities detained Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong book publisher with Swedish citizenship, may further strain relations between the two countries.
In 2015, Mr. Gui became a symbol of the Chinese government’s determination to smother criticism from abroad when he and four other Hong Kong booksellers disappeared and later resurfaced in China in police custody. 

Mr. Gui, whose business sold books critical of China’s leaders, was formally freed in 2017, but ordered to remain in China.
In February, more than two weeks after he was snatched from a Beijing-bound train, Mr. Gui resurfaced to say in a police-arranged interview that he wanted no help from the outside world. 

But Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, said that taking him from the train had been a “brutal intervention” and that China had contravened “basic international rules on consular support.”
In 2012, Chinese tourists spent $102 billion abroad, making them the world’s biggest source market for international tourism. 

They are an increasingly dominant spending force in Sweden and beyond, if also among the world’s most resented travelers.
Out of about 4.7 million guest nights by international visitors in Stockholm County in 2016, Chinese nationals accounted for 117,476, a 74 percent rise from 2011, according to data published by the Stockholm Business Region, a company owned by the city of Stockholm. 

Most stayed in hotels, but 7,392 stayed in hostels.
Given all that, the Chinese Embassy’s charge of “brutal abuse” leveled against the Swedish police was clearly a diplomatic shot across the bow. 

The embassy also said it was “deeply appalled and angered by what happened and strongly condemns” the behavior of the Swedish police.
“We urged the Swedish government to conduct thorough and immediate investigation, and respond to the Chinese citizens’ requests for punishment, apology and compensation in time,” it added. 

“We cannot understand why the Swedish side has not given us any feedback.”
Linn Duvhammar, a spokeswoman for Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the request by the Chinese Embassy but said the case had been handled by “the responsible authority,” referring to the police.
A spokesman for the police in Stockholm, Lars Bystrom, said Monday, “We have nothing more to say in this case.”
Karl Jigland, a press officer for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, said on Monday that the Public Prosecution Office determined that the police had not committed a criminal offense during the incident at the Generator hostel, and decided on Sept. 7 not to open a preliminary investigation.
The prosecutor’s office did not consider whether the police officers’ actions were “the best way to handle a situation,” he said, adding that such questions were handled by the police themselves. 

But Mr. Bystrom, the police spokesman, said no such investigation was being conducted in this case.
A receptionist who answered the phone at the Generator in Stockholm on Monday said she had no comment. 

The hostel is one of several Generator locations around Europe, and the company’s website describes the hostels as “unique, stylish, experience and design-led spaces at affordable rates.”
The Generator’s rules say that customers who disturb guests or fail to “conduct themselves in a reasonable and responsible manner” may be asked to leave.
Global Times reported that Zeng’s father was dragged out first by the police, and his wife fed him medicine as he lay on the ground. 

Zeng said it was at that point that he “lost his mind” and began yelling at police officers. 

He recalled saying: “Help, the Swedish police is killing us!”
After being dropped by the police near a cemetery outside the city, he said, the family waited for a half-hour until a passer-by stopped and gave them a ride back to Stockholm. 

He called the whole ordeal a “nightmare.”
On Chinese social media, some users expressed anger over the family’s ordeal, saying that the Swedish police’s apparent behavior was particularly insulting to older people. 

But many others described the family’s emotional reaction to their experience as a national disgrace for China.
One user wrote that Zeng’s outburst was a stunt that might work in China, but not Sweden, “a society ruled by law.”
“I condemn this kind of unruly behavior,” another wrote. 

“It is shameful for the whole family and the whole country.”
Still other users speculated that Global Times was publicizing Zeng’s story as retaliation against Sweden for recently hosting the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, who has been accused by China of secretly advocating Tibetan independence.

Sweden charges Tibetan resident with spying on fellow exiles for China

Charge escalates row between the two countries following China’s detention of Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai
By Lily Kuo in Hong Kong
 

A picture of Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai, who remains in detention in China. 

Sweden has charged a 49-year-old Tibetan man living in the country for spying on his fellow exiles for the Chinese government, according to Swedish media.
State prosecutors said the man, who is Tibetan and was working for the newspaper Voice of Tibet, is suspected of supplying the Chinese government with information about the families, housing situations and travel plans of “certain people of importance to the Chinese regime”.
According to Swedish state prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, the man had been in touch with Chinese officials in Poland and Finland. 

He had been paid 50,000 krona (£5,850) on one occasion. 

Ljungqvist said the man had been deeply embedded in the Tibetan community.
“This is a very serious crime,” he told reporters. 

The prosecutor did not give the suspect’s name.
The arrest comes about two months after Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai was taken from a train in China in the presence of Swedish consular officials. 

Three weeks later a video surfaced in which Gui expressed his guilt over unspecified offences, an admission that human rights activists said was a forced confession.

Sweden condemns China's 'brutal' detention of bookseller Gui Minhai

He remains in detention. 

Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallström, has called China’s treatment of Gui “unacceptable”. Gui is reportedly suffered from a neurological disease, but has not been allowed to see a doctor.
Critics have said Sweden is not doing enough to stand up to Beijing over the Hong Kong-based publisher who released books on China’s political elite.
Sweden is home to about 140 Tibetan exiles, according to Tibetan Community in Sweden, an organisation for the group, which has come under increasing pressure. 

Last year, Sweden’s security service also arrested a man for spying on Tibetans in the country.
“It is clear that there are spies who are sent by China to Tibetan communities, but this is the first time it’s been officially investigated,” Jamyang Choedon of the Tibetan Community in Sweden told the Swedish paper, the Local.
Uighur exiles living in Sweden have previously described ways they have been pressured to spy on each other. 

A Uighur asylum seeker told Swedish radio in an interview in 2012 that Chinese police approached her family, still in East Turkestan, saying that she had been accused of leaking state secrets. 

If she assisted in providing information, her sentence would be lighter, she was told.

Tsering Tsomo, the executive director of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Dharamsala, India, said Chinese consular officials withhold visas for Tibetan exiles with family still in Tibet to persuade them to give information on others.
“They don’t want to provoke the Chinese government, so they do something they don’t like just to get the visa,” she said.
Tsomo said others are embedded by China’s United Front Work Department, the Chinese Communist party’s arm for issues related to overseas Chinese.
“It’s quite common knowledge in the Tibetan community the United Front is very active in planting spies within the Tibetan community. They could be Tibetan, Chinese ... it could be anyone,” she said.

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.

Chinese State Terrorism

Sweden will press China to release publisher despite video criticism
REUTERS

Gui Minhai's forced confession

STOCKHOLM/HONG KONG--Sweden said on Saturday it would keep pressing China to release Swedish citizen and publisher Gui Minhai, even after he was shown in a filmed interview criticizing Stockholm for "sensationalizing" his case.
Gui was shown in an interview with journalists posted online overnight, making a statement that Amnesty International and other campaign groups said could have been staged. 

There was no immediate reaction to the rights groups from Chinese authorities.
The former Hong Kong-based publisher of books critical of China's leaders, was abducted in Thailand in 2015. 

He was one of five people in the Hong Kong book trade who went missing that year and later appeared in mainland Chinese custody.
After being partially released from Chinese custody late last year, he was seized last month by 10 plainclothes Chinese agents onboard a Beijing-bound train while in the presence of two Swedish diplomats.
In the latest twist of the saga, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post posted clips of Gui speaking to journalists about his case.
Gui, who has a Swedish passport, appeared relaxed at times in the footage. 

But Amnesty International said the comments given to largely pro-establishment media outlets appeared to have been staged.
"It's certainly a forced confession," William Nee, a China researcher with Amnesty International, told Hong Kong's public broadcaster RTHK. 

"The fact that he's kind of repeating talking points that the (Chinese) government wants to put out ... and as far as we know he's in incommunicado detention. He doesn't have lawyers of his choice or consular access right now."
In the video Gui said that Sweden had tried to get him out of China to Sweden, under the pretext of seeking medical treatment.
"During the journey, they (the Swedish officials) asked me not to get off the train, for fear it would catch other people's attention," Gui said in the online footage.
"I regret this very much now.
"Looking back, I might have become Sweden's chess piece. I broke the law again under their instigation. My wonderful life has been ruined and I would never trust the Swedish ever again."
Swedish foreign ministry spokeswoman Katarina Byrenius Roslund, defended Stockholm's position.
"This video changes nothing. We continue to demand that our citizen be given the opportunity to meet with Swedish diplomatic staff and medical staff," she said in an email to Reuters.
Gui added he was still involved in an unspecified court case involving an "illegal business" and wasn't able to leave China. 

Other details of Gui's charges and detention weren't specified in the video clips.
Gui's daughter, Angela, who is now studying in England and has been highly critical of the Chinese government's handling of her father's case, wasn't immediately available for comment.
Amid reports that Gui's health has worsened, Gui said in the interview that he had spinal and muscle problems, but that this wasn't Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, as some had suggested.
China's foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the interview and whether Gui had been forced into giving it.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.”