Dozens of European politicians have signed a letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping asking for the immediate and unconditional release of Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen arrested last month on a high-speed train bound for Beijing, according to the Nova agency. The Guardian newspaper on Tuesday revealed that Gui, whose small Hong Kong publishing house publishes small polemical books against the Chinese political establishment, was traveling with the Swedish consul general in Shanghai, Lisette Lindahl, at the time of the his arrest by plainclothes agents. Later the Swedish ambassador to China, Anna Lindstedt, was informed by the Chinese authorities that Gui, a Swedish citizen since 1992, is suspected of violating state secrets.
Already in 2015, Gui had disappeared from a holiday home in Thailand, only to reappear in the custody of the Chinese authorities; the case alarmed the European governments, because it created a disturbing precedent: the extra-judicial seizure of a European citizen by the Chinese authorities. The letter sent yesterday to the Chinese president, which includes among others the signatures of Swedish, German and British parliamentarians Hungarians, Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards expressed a "strong condemnation" of Gui's arrest and asked that the man "be protected from torture and other abuses". "Gui is not the first European citizen unjustly detained in China, but we aspire to be the last", reads the letter, which also attributes to Beijing "a worrying tendency to repression" in defiance of national and international regulations. The newspaper "Global Times", affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, responded by accusing the EU of emphasizing the case for political reasons, and the British media of attacking the Chinese judicial system.