UK Edition
Daughter of detained Hong Kong bookseller fears for safety in UK after 'scary' incident
The daughter of a Hong Kong bookseller being detained by Chinese authorities says she does not feel safe in Britain and fears she is being monitored.
Angela Gui, a swede who is a student at the University of Warwick, said she had begun to feel “nervous” since a mysterious incident when she was confronted by a group of Chinese men.
The 22-year-old has been campaigning for the release of her father, Gui Minhai, who emerged in detention in China in January after he “disappeared” from his Thai holiday home just over a year ago.
The detention of the publisher and four colleagues who dealt in books that are highly critical of Beijing’s leaders sparked global concerns that China was kidnapping opponents from outside its borders.
It also increased worries over China’s tightening grip on Hong Kong, which resurfaced again earlier this week when Beijing effectively barred two pro-Independence politicians from taking office in the city’s parliament.
Ms Gui said she was approached by three Chinese men last month in the German city of Frankfurt, where she was attending a book fair.
She had made discreet arrangements via email to meet an event organiser in a secluded location outside the venue.
When she arrived, the Chinese men moved directly in front of her and began taking photographs with a large DSLR camera before jumping into a minivan which had tinted windows.
“They looked right at me. Zoomed right in. I looked behind, but there was nothing, so you could tell they were pointing straight at me,” Ms Gui told The Telegraph.
“It was very odd that they happened to be there just when I arrived. They were speaking in Mandarin so they must have been Chinese mainlanders.
“They knew exactly when I was going to be at that location, which I thought was a bit scary.”
Ms Gui has become reasonably well-known in human rights circles and in the media in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, where Cantonese, rather than Mandarin is spoken.
But she would be unknown on the Chinese mainland as she has never appeared in domestic media, which is tightly controlled by Beijing.
Ms Gui fears that her campaign to shine the spotlight on her father’s detention has riled Chinese authorities, and that the incident in Frankfurt was staged “to get across the message that I am being watched”.
The Masters student also said she has noticed that her email accounts often appear to have been hacked, as messages have been automatically forwarded.
The year-long detention of Gui Minhai, who has Swedish nationality, has sparked international outrage which climaxed when he was paraded on Chinese television in January to “confess” that he had returned to China of his own accord.
A sobbing Mr Gui said he sought to turn himself in to mainland authorities over a fatal hit-and-run accident that he was involved in more than a decade ago.
That account was widely questioned by observers, and Ms Gui told a US congressional hearing in Washington in May that the international community should pressure Beijing over carrying out "illegal operations on foreign soil”.
One of Mr Gui’s colleagues, Lee Bo, a British passport holder, was thought to have been abducted from Hong Kong – a city which supposedly has legal autonomy from China under agreements signed by the UK.
However, Mrs Gui said that despite Britain’s responsibility towards guaranteeing freedoms in its former colony, she has received little help from UK politicians.
“I actually have surprisingly little interest from the British, which has been disappointing,” she said.
The British government has twice raised concerns over the booksellers issue in its six-monthly report on Hong Kong, and The Telegraph understands that diplomats sought access to Mr Bo when he was in detention.
All of the booksellers – apart from Mr Gui - were released earlier this year and have returned to Hong Kong. Three of them remain silent, and observers believe they have been intimidated into not speaking to the media by Beijing.
Calls by The Telegraph to Mr Gui’s family in Ningbo, his home town, also suggested that they were being monitored by Chinese security officials, as they were too scared to speak.
Ms Gui said her recent experiences have led her to change the way she views her life in the UK.
“I am much more careful now,” she said. “I feel uncomfortable walking alone, especially at night.
“The feeling of being watched - especially after this Frankfurt incident – it kind of does change the way that you relate to your surroundings.
“I do not like being on my own and I am thinking about moving. It makes me nervous that people might know where I live.”