Barbara Demick
February 17, 2016
Why Did China Kidnap Its Provocateurs?
Last October 17th, Gui Minhai, the publisher of Mighty Current Media, in Hong Kong, returned from grocery shopping to his seaside condominium in Thailand and found a young man waiting for him at the front gate. Gui chatted with the man for a few minutes, and then drove off with the young man in his own white hatchback, but not before asking the doorman to leave the groceries in the hall outside his apartment. The implication was that he would be back shortly. He never came back.
Two months later, Lee Bo, who with Gui Minhai was a co-owner of Mighty Current and ran the company’s Hong Kong bookstore, stayed late at work, preparing a large book order he was supposed to deliver to a client. Closed-circuit footage from the office elevator showed him speaking to a young man in a cap. When he didn’t come home for dinner as expected, his wife called the police.
On January 11th, Li Xin, a Chinese dissident journalist, was on a train in northern Thailand heading toward the border with Laos. He was staying in Thailand while seeking political asylum, and needed to leave the country to renew his tourist visa. “Left the train and heading toward the border,’’ he texted his wife. Then he vanished.
The mysteries, which Jiayang Fan wrote about in early January, have since been solved. All three men were kidnapped to China for political offenses: publishing information embarrassing to the Communist Party. Each man later made calls or sent messages to family claiming he had returned to China “voluntarily’’; these claims are widely believed to have been made under duress. Three other men involved with Mighty Current Media vanished shortly after Gui Minhai, although it appears that they were seized while on the mainland.
China’s treatment of its critics is notorious. Between July and September of last year, two hundred and eighty human-rights lawyers and activists were detained, according toHuman Rights Watch. The extralegal methods used in these recent cases go even further: they are tantamount to kidnappings. Thailand, of course, is a sovereign country. Hong Kong has its own legal system, enshrined by the treaty that allowed its 1997 handover from Britain. Because of distrust of China’s legal system, Hong Kong does not have a rendition agreement with the mainland.
The Chinese are not the first to resort to extraordinary rendition. The most famous case was the Israeli abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires, in 1960, to stand trial for war crimes. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency picked up at least a hundred and thirty-six terrorism suspects and moved them to secret locations around the world for interrogation and often torture.
The men recently abducted by China were not suspected war criminals or terrorists. With one possible exception, they were not so much dissidents as irritants. Gui Minhai and Lee Bo’s Mighty Current Media specializes in thinly sourced and often salacious books about the Chinese leadership. At the time the men were kidnapped, the company was said to be planning a book called “Xi Jinping and His Six Women.” One recent book purports to tell how first lady Peng Liyuan lost her virginity. (The Hong Kong Free Press, a nonprofit news Web site started last year, published the following quote from the book: “Peng Liyuan quietly pushed open that half-closed door in the General’s Building, like a wisp of soft wind. The house was silent and empty except for one room where light came out, that was Li Hui’s bedroom… . Before he could finish talking, Peng Liyuan stuffed her sweet soft tongue into his mouth . . .”)
Had these books been published elsewhere, the offending publishers might have been swatted away with a defamation suit. But the Communist Party so zealously guards the privacy of the leadership that, on the mainland, information about Xi Jinping is available only from state publishers. Most people do not know even relatively anodyne facts, such as the fact that he was previously married and divorced. So Hong Kong bookstores catering to mainland visitors, especially at the airport, do a brisk business in books about China, the serious as well as the silly.
Gui Minhai, who was abducted from his condo in Thailand, is a naturalized Swedish citizen. He studied poetry at the prestigious Peking University, but later discovered that potboilers about the Chinese leadership were more lucrative. Three months after his disappearance, the state news agency Xinhua released a scripted confession, in which Gui said he had returned to China voluntarily to face charges for a 2003 car accident in which a young woman died. “Returning to the Chinese mainland and surrendering was my personal choice and had nothing to do with anyone else. I should shoulder my responsibility and I don’t want any individual or institutions to interfere, or viciously hype up my return,” the statement said.
Lee Bo (also known as Paul Lee), a British national, was investigating the disappearance of Gui Minhai and his three other colleagues, and giving interviews pressing for their release, when he himself fell into the dragnet. According to some accounts, he was set up by the person who claimed to be putting in a large book order. A pro-Beijing legislator at first claimed that Lee had crossed to mainland China to visit a prostitute and was detained there. Last month, that flagrant lie was changed to another, when a fax from Lee appeared, saying he had gone to China voluntarily to “assist in an investigation.” The three Mighty Current employees taken into custody within China made similar claims in calls to their families.
Li Xin, the journalist who disappeared in Northern Thailand, apparently was not connected to the others who vanished. He worked as an editor for the Web site ofSouthern Metropolis Daily, which is based in Guangzhou and is part of China’s feistiest media group. Li had angered Chinese authorities by exposing the inner workings of the censorship system. According to Radio Free Asia, he had been threatened with espionage charges unless he informed on fellow dissidents. Early last year, Li fled to Thailand, seeking political asylum.
On February 3rd, Li’s wife said that she had received a telephone call from her husband in which he told her that he was in Chinese police custody and that he had come back voluntarily. “I felt he was forced to say those words, that he said them against his will,’’ she told the Guardian.
Jerome Cohen, a law professor at New York University and an expert on the Chinese legal system, believes the recent round of abductions were so ham-handed that they may have been the work of local authorities, perhaps from Guangdong Province, across the border from Hong Kong. “You have to wonder what level of government authorized this,” said Cohen. “This is so embarrassing to the P.R.C.” He says the abductions will damage Beijing’s efforts to legitimately retrieve criminal suspects, especially those targeted in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive, who have fled with their money to the United States, which does not have an extradition treaty with China.
The abductions have only added to the hostility toward the mainland in Hong Kong, which was brought to a standstill in 2014 by tens of thousands of student protesters. Last month, several thousand people marched there to demand the the release of the bookstore owners and staff, who have been dubbed the “Bookstore Five.” Martin Lee, a lawyer who helped draft Hong Kong’s constitution, calls the abductions the “most worrying thing that has happened in Hong Kong since the handover in 1997.” In a report issued last Thursday, the British Foreign Office concluded that Lee Bo was “involuntarily removed” from Hong Kong, and for the first time accused China of breaching the treaty that authorized Hong Kong’s handover.
The kidnappings in Thailand are especially worrisome to the international community. Thailand is a destination for refugees from all parts of Asia, from the Rohingya of Myanmar to North Koreans. But with Thailand now ruled by a military junta, which took power in 2014, and its economy limping, the country is increasingly bowing to the will of Beijing. In November, it repatriated two pro-democracy activists to China despite the fact that they had papers from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees confirming they were to be settled in a third country. In July, Thailand sent home one hundred Uighurs, Muslims from northwestern China who often are denied passports and so try to leave China via land borders without documentation.
The kidnappings bring Thailand’s capitulation to a new level. Most countries do not even permit their allies to spirit away whomever they like without at least some veneer of legality. But Thai officials dithered in investigating the disappearances, saying that they could not do anything about the two disappearances unless family members came to Thailand to file missing person reports. When Time reporter Hannah Beech toured Gui Minhai’s apartment last month—two months after he disappeared but before he was known to be in Chinese custody—she was told that the Thai police had never visited. The wife of Li Xin, the missing journalist, told Voice of America that the Thai Police refused to handle the case and instead urged her to contact the Chinese embassy in Bangkok.
Consider, by way of contrast, that after the Central Intelligence Agency snatched Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr off the streets of Milan, in 2003, and transported him out of the country, Italian prosecutors filed kidnapping charges against twenty-three Americans, including the C.I.A. station chief. They were convicted in absentia. Italy is still actively pursuing their extradition.
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