Journalist in search of refuge in Thailand disappears

Journalist in search of refuge in Thailand disappears

Chinese journalist Li Xin talks to a reporter over Skype, in New Delhi, India. Li has been missing from Thailand since Jan 11, and it is suspected he was abducted by Beijing. (AP photo)
Chinese journalist Li Xin talks to a reporter over Skype, in New Delhi, India. Li has been missing from Thailand since Jan 11, and it is suspected he was abducted by Beijing. (AP photo)

A Chinese journalist travelling across Thailand on a frantic quest for political refuge messaged his wife to say that he would soon reach the border with Laos. Then, two weeks ago, the journalist, Li Xin, disappeared.

Now, Li's wife, He Fangmei, and his supporters suspect he has joined a growing list of people at odds with Beijing who have been spirited into China across borders, especially from Thailand.

"I haven't heard any word from him," Ms He said on Monday after deciding to speak out about her husband's disappearance. "Now, Thailand and China are kicking the ball back and forth."

Security agencies in Beijing appear increasingly determined to extinguish the idea that citizens who defy the Chinese government, including dissidents and corrupt officials, can easily find safety abroad, and the examples of secretive handovers to China from Thailand are multiplying.

Thailand's military rulers, for their part, appear to be seeking economic and political backing from Beijing in return for security and police cooperation, including over secretive extraditions, analysts say.

"The government is desperate to make friends with a powerful player," said Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher on Thailand for Human Rights Watch who is critical of the deportations because they bypass the legal system.

The recent acceleration of deportations to China from Thailand began in July, when the Thai government returned about 100 members of the Uighur ethnic minority, a largely Sunni Muslim people whose homeland in northwest China has become increasingly riven with tensions and violence. The Uighurs who were handed over by Thailand had travelled there hoping to be settled in third countries, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called their deportation a "flagrant violation of international law".

In October, Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong book publisher who specialised in scurrilous potboilers about China's communist elite, disappeared from his holiday home in Pattaya. He emerged on Chinese television this month offering a confession for having left China in 2003, violating probation after an automobile accident in which the car he was driving struck and killed a young woman. In November, two Chinese dissidents seeking sanctuary in Thailand, Jiang Yefei and Dong Guanping, were sent back to China despite having been recognised as refugees by the UN refugee agency.

The Chinese police later said that the two men had been in Thailand without authorisation and were suspected of crimes involving illegal border crossing.

"The transfer procedure for the two was in accordance with a cooperation mechanism between Chinese and Thai police," Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said, citing the police.

A spokesman for the Thai government could not be reached on Monday.

Panitan Wattanayagorn, an adviser to the deputy prime minister, said he was not aware of the disappearance of Li, the journalist. Speaking more generally about deportations, he said Thailand had to responsive to China's rising influence in trade, investment and tourism.

"Several years ago, the number of Chinese tourists here was not even 1 million," Mr Panitan said. "Now it's approaching 10 million."

He emphasised that Thailand must continue to rely on the United States for security cooperation. In the military sphere, "The US is still number 1," he said.

"Yes, we are holding military exercises with the Chinese, but it's very small," he said. "It's 10 pilots compared with 10,000 US Marines. It's not comparable."

The Chinese government has said that suspects of crimes who return from abroad, including officials and their relatives accused of graft, have often come voluntarily, offering extravagant contrition for their misdeeds.

But critics say the secretive operations are likely to involve coercion and threats, if not outright force, and they point to the far-fetched accounts that detainees have given in the Chinese state-run news media.

Li's wife said she had reservations about his trip to Thailand. He had said before his disappearance that he feared that if he was forced to go back to China, he would be punished for having publicly recounted the intense pressure that state security officers had used to recruit him as an informant against his colleagues and friends, and for having described censorship he witnessed in his job as an editor.

"Many, many people have been brought back to China," Ms He said. "I didn't want him to go to Thailand."

Friends who had asked about his fate in Thailand had received no news, and nor had his father in the central province of Henan, who had reported his disappearance to the local police, she said.

She said she had last heard from Li two weeks ago, when he sent a message by phone saying that he was walking toward Thailand's northeastern frontier with Laos after taking a train from Bangkok. "Left the train and heading toward the border," said his last message, which reached his wife while she was asleep.

Li had first gone to India hoping to obtain a visa to the United States, where he intended to apply for asylum. Failing that, he hoped for an extension of his stay in India. He succeeded at neither and so decided to go to Thailand.

There, his wife said, he turned his hopes to gaining official status as a refugee and qualifying for settlement in another country. He needed to leave Thailand and to re-enter with a new tourist visa.

"He planned to apply for refugee status after coming back to Thailand," Ms He said. The couple has a 2-year-old son and she is pregnant with their second child.

There appears to have been no news from Li since Jan 11. But before he disappeared, he told journalists he feared persecution if he returned to China.

Li, formerly an editor for the website of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a popular Chinese newspaper, travelled to India in October and to Thailand on Jan 1, hoping to escape the reach of Chinese state security agents, who he said had threatened to charge him with spying unless he agreed to act as an informant against colleagues and civic groups.

"Is he still in another country, or has he been handed over to the Chinese Communist Party?" his wife wrote in an account of his disappearance.

"If it's the former, then what reason is there to detain a citizen who entered on a lawful visa? If it's the latter, then let the Chinese Communist Party explain what crime Li Xi committed, and how they could cross a border to capture a Chinese citizen with a lawful passport and visa and no criminal record."

A spokesman for the US embassy in Beijing referred questions about the case to Washington.

Mr Sunai of Human Rights Watch said the renditions of Chinese citizens back to China were symbolic of a shift in Thailand.

In 2003, when Bangkok and Washington were closer allies, the Thai government allowed the rendition to Indonesia of Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian known as Hambali, who is believed to have been the mastermind behind the 2002 nightclub attacks in Bali that killed more than 200 people.

Now, Bangkok is obliging Beijing, Mr Sunai said. Thailand, he said, "has changed from one major ally to another."

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