The daughter of jailed Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai has said she believes authorities purposefully announced his harsh sentence – 10 years in prison for espionage - during the coronavirus outbreak in hopes that it would go unnoticed.
Angela Gui, who has been advocating for her father, a China-born Swedish citizen, since he was abducted from Thailand in 2015, said she was told last year that a trial would soon take place. In a meeting with Sweden’s former ambassador and two men who said they could arrange her father’s release, Gui was pressured to stop speaking out.
“I didn’t believe that my silence would positively impact my father’s situation in any way, but I think there was a plan to try and limit media attention to the case so that a harsh sentence could happen unnoticed,” she said.
“The recent coverage on the coronavirus and the expulsion of foreign journalists may have provided an environment where this came as a surprise,” she said, referring to Beijing’s recent decision to kick three Wall Street Journal reporters out of China.
On Tuesday, a court in Ningbo said in a brief statement on its website that Gui’s father had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for “providing intelligence overseas”. Chinese officials had previously said he was detained for charges related to illegal business operations. The notice, which did not give specifics about what intelligence Gui Minhai had provided or to whom, said he had pled guilty.
Angela Gui and human rights advocates have criticised the verdict as baseless and motivated by his role in publishing books that tarnished the image of the leaders of China’s communist party, including Xi Jinping.
“I don’t believe he would have pled guilty … because of the incredible vagueness of the crime,” she said. “What constitutes ‘illegally providing intelligence overseas’? He hasn’t been overseas since he was kidnapped, and the only ‘intelligence’ he will have been able to share would have been what happened to him when Chinese agents illegally extradited him from Thailand.”
Gui Minhai was the second of five Hong Kong-based publishers connected to the independent book store Causeway Bay Books to go missing in late 2015, in a case that shocked the city and became one of the most visible symbols of Beijing’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s freedoms, as promised under the “one country, two systems” framework.
His publishing company Mighty Current was known for provocative titles about China’s political elite. In the wake of the five booksellers’ disappearances, Xi Nuo the author of a book called “Xi Jinping and His Mistresses” told Voice of America he had been in talks with Gui Minhai to publish the title but the deal fell through after Gui said it was too risky.
All five booksellers eventually reappeared in mainland China and confessed to illegally selling books in mainland China. In a confession broadcast on state television, Gui said he had come to China of his own accord to confess to a drunk-driving incident that took place a decade earlier, one of several statements friends and family say have been coerced.
While the others were eventually released, Gui was barred from leaving in China and in 2018 plainclothes Chinese agents detained him from a train he was taking with Swedish diplomats to a medical appointment.
Gui Minhai’s case also underlines Beijing’s determination to treat Chinese-born foreign nationals as Chinese citizens. Gui Minhai had become a Swedish in the 1990s, giving up his Chinese citizenship. According to the notice from the Ningbo court, he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018 – a measure observers have described as an unprecedented move to cut off consular access. China does not recognise dual nationality.
“It is a travesty, and it is also an affront against Sweden, and against the European Union,” said Magnus Fiskesjö, an associate professor at Cornell University and former Swedish diplomat in Beijing who has known Gui Minhai since the 1980s.
Sweden and European officials have said that Gui Minhai remains a Swedish citizen and called for consular access to him. “There are serious questions to be answered about this case. His rights, including inter alia to consular access and due process, have not been respected,” the EU said in a statement on Tuesday.
“I can only guess that it is an even more aggressive way for China to insist to Sweden and the European Union that he wants nothing to do with them,” Angela Gui said. “I really hope this new level of disregard for the rule of law means the EU is able to finally show that China’s behaviour towards its citizens will have consequences.”
Human rights observers have often criticised China’s use of secret, closed-door trials. The court in Ningbo on Tuesday said Gui Minhai’s hearing had been “according to the law” and that “some members of the public” had attended. But Angela Gui said she was not notified before the trial took place and only received news of the verdict after the notice was posted online.
“I had no idea this would happen now, but I was prepared for a trial which I didn’t expect I’d hear much about until after,” she said. “As difficult as this news has been to me, I haven’t been entirely surprised.”
