Sweden has called on China to immediately free missing bookseller Gui Minhai who was seized by Chinese agents on Saturday as he travelled to Beijing with two European diplomats.
In a statement, Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallström, said: “We expect the immediate release of our fellow citizen, and that he be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff.”
Wallström said Stockholm took “a very serious view” of Gui’s detention which had taken place “during an ongoing consular support mission”. China had given “no specific reason” for the action.
The European Union’s ambassador to China, Hans Dietmar Schweisgut, added his weight to the demand, saying in a statement on Wednesday that he expected Gui to be released.
Sweden’s foreign minister also rejected insinuations by her counterparts in China’s foreign ministry that the two Swedish diplomats travelling with Gui when he was taken had violated unspecified laws.
On Tuesday, China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, denied all knowledge of Gui’s case, claiming it was not a diplomatic matter, but hinted Sweden’s diplomats had committed some unspecified act of wrongdoing.
Wallström said: “Gui Minhai was at the time of his arrest in the company of diplomatic staff, who were 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.”
“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.”
Gui, a 53-year-old Chinese-born Swede who worked on sensational tomes about the private lives of China’s political elite, was detained on Saturday morning as he took a train to Beijing from the eastern city of Ningbo accompanied by the diplomats. According to the bookseller’s daughter, Angela, he was heading to the capital for a medical examination at the Swedish embassy as a result of concerns he may be suffering from a rare neurological disease.
“This was precisely what wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said of his detention.
It was the second time in just over two years that Gui had been spirited into custody by Chinese agents. In October 2015, he vanished from his Thai holiday home, later reappearing in detention in China where he made what supporters, who accuse Beijing of his abduction, denounced as a forced televised confession. Gui had appeared close to release last autumn amid reports that he was “half-free” and living under surveillance, some of the time in Ningbo.
While China’s foreign ministry claimed ignorance of the case, The Global Times, a semi-official Communist party tabloid, confirmed the bookseller had been “seized by police”. In an editorial it accused western journalists of having “sensationalised the incident”: “They have no right to question Chinese police,” it said, vowing: “No external force can thwart the process of justice.”
“The western media still wants to wield their hegemonic discourse power to manipulate the judgment of sensitive information about China and therefore continue to attack China’s political system,” the Global Times added.
Writing on Twitter, the missing publisher’s daughter offered a scathing critique of the newspaper’s literary abilities. “Reads like an unfortunate essay from an introductory course to Marxist theory,” she wrote.
In London, Fiona Bruce MP, the chair of the Conservative party’s human rights commission, also demanded answers over Gui’s case. “What steps has the United Kingdom taken to raise this case and to urge the Chinese authorities to allow him to leave China and reunite him with his family, including his daughter who studies in Cambridge … and who campaigns valiantly for her father’s release?”