MCLC: Questions about the 'release' or 're-dissapearance' of Gui Minhai

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Questions about the ‘release’ or ‘re-dissapearance’ of Gui Minhai
The Swedish Foreign Ministry this morning announced that (unspecified) Chinese authorities have informed them that Gui Minhai, the Swedish publisher based in Hong Kong who was kidnapped from Thailand in October 2015, and who has just passed two years in Chinese detention, has been "freed."
At the same time the Swedish ministry took care to specify that they have not been able to get answers to their follow-up questions: presumably, where is he, may we speak to him.
Reuters is thus correct in its headline below to cautiously limit this news to saying "China tells Sweden it has freed Swedish bookseller" Gui Minhai. (Reuters failed to mention the follow-up concerns).
This is big news, in Sweden as elsewhere, but much caution is warranted. Note that some insufficiently cautious Swedish media and many other international media jumped the gun and erroneously said he was released, which is clearly not correct, since his whereabouts remain unclear. He is out of reach of his family a week after his supposed release. See his daughter's statement:
https://twitter.com/angelagui_/status/922760751139508224/photo/1
Many now fear that this "release" of Gui Minhai is an orchestrated move to disappear him again, and keep him in detention, akin to the "release" of the Chinese lawyer Xie Yang who was supposedly "freed," but not even his wife could see him, in May 2017 (http://www.rfa.org/english/women/lawyer-spouse-05102017150051.html), or the case of the legal assistant Ms Zhao Wei who was disappeared, held, and then said to be "free" while her family could still not reach her. And, infamously, the South China Morning Post in HK, recently bought by a Chinese billionaire, published an interview with Zhao Wei after she had been declared "released" but her family and friends were unable to reach her. The SCMP was closely questioned by many other media asking how the SCMP did this interview with an unfree person. The "interview" had, of course, been planted by the regime, but the SCMP could not admit this, and was reduced to hiding behind a professional-style facade, "we can't reveal our sources" (see: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/south-china-morning-post-china-influence-hong-kong-newspaper-confession). --These "releases" amount to distracting manouevers.
If the Chinese authorities do not grant the Swedish publisher freedom, including especially the freedom to leave China and go back to Sweden or Hong Kong or wherever, he clearly is not free. In my view, it is not acceptable that Chinese authorities abduct people from abroad and then detain and intimidate them for years, including by putting them on state TV as a demeaning, extra-legal spectacle, which is what happened to, in this case, a fellow citizen of Sweden. And if we accept it, can happen to anyone.
For today's news in English, see f ex:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-sweden-china-bookseller/china-tells-sweden-it-has-freed-swedish-bookseller-swedish-government-idUKKBN1CT15N
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/10/24/sweden-claims-china-released-dissident-publisher-gui-minhai-daughter-says-not-free/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/world/asia/gui-minhai-hong-kong-bookseller.html
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/2116797/detained-hong-kong-book-publisher-gui-minhai-released
(The SCMP trying hard to be fair and square! )
--Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42 at cornell.edu
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 25, 2017
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