Sweden – Expressen, April 26, 2025
Ten years ago, Gui Minhai was kidnapped by China.
This fall, according to the sentence, the punishment will have been served – but no one knows whether the Swedish publisher will be released.
– The Swedish government has not acted forcefully enough, says Aleksandra Bielakowska, representative of Reporters Without Borders in Taiwan.
The images from surveillance cameras in Thailand in October 2015 are the last ones of Gui Minhai in freedom. After the Swedish publisher was taken from his vacation home to China by the regime’s unidentifiable agents, he has only appeared in bizarre forced confessions on Chinese television.
The first two occurred just months later, when he tearfully claimed he had handed himself over to atone for a traffic accident that allegedly took place over a decade ago. Then a third time in 2018, where he begged the world to ignore his situation in a video where a tooth seemed to be missing.
After several twists, Gui Minhai was sentenced in 2020 to ten years in prison for illegal intelligence activity. In China, as in Sweden, the time spent in custody before a sentence is counted toward any potential prison sentence.
But what will happen this fall, when it will have been ten years since Gui Minhai was first kidnapped and brought to China, remains unclear.
– Generally speaking, even in “political cases” like Gui’s, the Chinese criminal justice system releases people when the sentence is complete, says Thomas Kellogg, chair of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, to Expressen.
There are several examples from Taiwan, with the activist Lee Ming-che being one of the most prominent. He was arrested in 2017 at the airport in Macao on his way to China and was then sentenced to five years in prison for subversive activities.
Part of the evidence was books found in his suitcase. The case reminded many of Gui Minhai, whose real source of disfavor was that the books he published were not liked by the regime in Beijing.
But the similarities end there. For Lee Ming-che, his wife was allowed to visit him over a dozen times during his time in prison, before he was released in April 2022 after serving his sentence. As for Gui Minhai, we don’t even know where he has been held since 2020, and his daughter, Angela Gui, has not heard from her father in seven years.
