Activist who vanished in Thailand is being held in China, says wife

The wife of a Chinese journalist and campaigner who vanished in Thailand last month says her husband has resurfaced in mainland China and is being held by police at an undisclosed location.

Li Xin, a former journalist at the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, went missing in January as he prepared to travel from Thailand to Laos.

Li, 37, had fled China for India last October, allegedly after Chinese security agents tried to coerce him into spying on fellow activists. Early last month he arrived in Thailand, which is home to a large community of Chinese political exiles and where he had hoped to claim asylum.

Li’s disappearance was the latest in a spate of cases in which critics of China’s Communist party leaders have mysteriously vanished in Thailand or been deported by the country’s pro-Beijing junta.

In November two well-known Chinese dissidents, Dong Guangping and Jiang Yefei, who had sought refuge in Thailand after incurring Beijing’s wrath, were repatriated, sparking condemnation from rights groups and the UN.

The previous month, Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong bookseller who specialised in sensational tomes about the private lives of China’s leaders, vanished from his beachfront flat in the Thai town of Pattaya. Gui reappeared last month, claiming in a “confession” broadcast by Chinese state television that he had voluntarily handed himself over to police over a hit-and-run accident that he said had taken place more than a decade ago.

Gui’s daughter said she believed her father had been abducted and forcibly returned to China.

On Wednesday, He Fangmei, Li Xin’s wife, told the Guardian she feared that her husband had suffered a similar fate. He, who also uses the name Shi Sanmei, said she had been summoned to a police station near the couple’s home in Henan province on Tuesday.

She said she had been allowed to speak to her husband, who was apparently in a different location, on Wednesday over an internal police telephone system.

“He said: ‘This is Li Xin. I’m in China. I’m fine. Don’t worry. I came back to China willingly to face investigation,’” his wife said. “I asked: ‘Why do you have to face an investigation if you didn’t commit any crime?’”

He, who is four months pregnant with the couple’s second child, rejected her husband’s claim that he had voluntarily returned to China. “I do not believe it. I 100% do not believe it,” she said. “I felt he was forced to say those words, that he said them against his will. Each time I tried to ask him a question he interrupted me.”

Yan Bojun, a Chinese activist who fled to Thailand last year and is seeking asylum through the United Nations, said he had last seen Li Xin over dinner on 9 January, on the eve of his disappearance.

“I warned him to be very careful in Thailand. It is very dangerous here,” said Yan, a former university professor from Hunan province who is living in hiding in Bangkok. “The CCP [Chinese Communist party] is very strong here.”

Human rights activists have expressed outrage at the apparent internationalisation of Chinese repression under President Xi Jinping. They believe that dissidents being returned to China are likely to have been coerced or forced into doing so by Beijing’s agents.

Writing in the Guardian last December, Amnesty International’s east Asia director, Nicholas Bequelin, accused China of slowly eroding “one of international law’s key principles: the prohibition against returning people to a place where they could face persecution or other serious human rights violations”.

He wrote: “Many, like Thailand’s military rulers, but also the governments in Cambodia, Pakistan or central Asian countries, appear all too eager to help – in clear contravention of their own international obligations to protect those seeking refuge.”