Abducted Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai was sentenced to 10 years in a mainland prison for purportedly “providing intelligence” overseas, nearly five years after he and four other booksellers became poster children for Chinese encroachment on Hong Kong’s freedoms.
The Intermediate People’s Court of Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, said in a statement today that Gui would not be appealing the verdict.
Gui, who held Swedish citizenship, ran the independent bookstore Causeway Books, which drew the ire of mainland officials for selling politically sensitive titles, including gossipy ones about Chinese Communist Party officials. His disappearance in 2015, along with four other booksellers, is one of the reasons often cited for Hongkongers’ growing fears of mainland interference.
The statement by the court in Ningbo acknowledged Gui became a naturalized Swedish citizen in the ‘90s, but claimed that he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018, presumably during the brief three-month period between 2015 and today during which he was not incarcerated. It did not say whether he had forfeited his Swedish citizenship.
Gui first vanished from his vacation home in Thailand in 2015, resurfacing months later in the custody of Chinese authorities to issue what appeared to be a coerced confession, in which he said he was turning himself in for a decade old drunk-driving incident in Ningbo, where he once lived.
He was released in 2017, but was kept under close surveillance, and was rearrested in 2018 by plainclothes officers en route to Beijing for a medical appointment while in the company of two Swedish diplomats, prompting an outcry from Sweden and the EU.
In November, the literary organization Swedish PEN awarded Gui the Tucholsky prize for persecuted writers, prompting a stern rebuke from Beijing, according to Reuters.
A month later, Anna Lindstedt, Sweden’s former ambassador to Beijing, was indicted by Swedish authorities for allegedly overstepping her authority by setting up a meeting between Chinese officials and Gui’s daughter, Angela, in an attempt to negotiate the bookseller’s release. Lindstedt denies any wrongdoing.
Born in Ningbo, Gui lived in Beijing during the 1980s, and later moved to Gothenburg to study and became a Swedish citizen. After moving to Hong Kong in the early 2000s, he got into publishing and authored books under a pen name.
