The daughter of one of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing late last year has called on US authorities to help end her father’s “unofficial and illegal” detention in China.
Four men working for a Hong Kong publishing house which specialized in gossipy works about Chinese leaders went missing from various locations in October, with another disappearing at the end of December. They all reappeared eventually in China.
“It has now been eight months since my father and his colleagues were taken into custody. I still haven’t been told where he is, how he’s been treated, or what his legal status is,” Angela Gui said on Tuesday at a US congressional hearing in Washington.
Her father, Gui Minhai (桂民海), a Swedish national and co-owner of the Mighty Current publishing company, failed to return from a holiday in Thailand in October.
His “unofficial and illegal” detention “is especially shocking in light of the fact that my father held Swedish and only Swedish citizenship”, she told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Three of the other men disappeared in China and one went missing from Hong Kong.
Gui Minhai mysteriously re-emerged on state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) in January, and said he had returned to China to “take legal responsibilities” for killing a college student in a car accident 11 years earlier.
In another televised confession in February, he said he tried to smuggle illegal books into China.
Angela Gui said she wanted “the US to take every opportunity to ask China for information on my father’s status as well as urge that he be freed immediately.”
“Despite having been told to stay quiet, I believe speaking up is the only option I have,” UK-based Angela Gui said. “I’m convinced my father would have done this for me, were I the one abducted and illegitimately detained.”
Gui said she suspected her father’s “confession” had been “clearly staged” in an attempt to “fabricate a justification” for his abduction, adding: “Only a state agency, acting coercively and against both international and China’s own law could achieve such a disappearance.”
Gui’s testimony was part of a hearing by the commission to investigate what it claimed were intensifying Chinese efforts to silence its critics around the world.
“The methods used by Beijing to enforce a code of silence are going global,” said Republican Representative Chris Smith, the committee’s chairman. “The heavy hand of the Chinese government has expanded beyond its borders to intimidate and stifle critical discussion of the Chinese government’s human rights record and repressive policies.”
China was now “actively engaged in trying to roll back democracy and human rights norms globally,” Smith added.
He cited the forced repatriation of Uighur refugees and dissidents from Thailand and Cambodia, the harassment of relatives of journalists and activists and Beijing’s denial of visas to dissidents and foreign academics who criticized China’s government.
Angela Gui called on the international community to demand an end to China’s “illegal operations on foreign soil.”
Additional reporting by the Guardian
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