[eddieplan9]

Parent’s keyword is “allow to succeed”, not “succeed”. I always warn people about false equivalence when it comes to China. The laws and rules in China are not the same concept as laws and rules in the West. There are implicit rules or 潜规则. The rules and laws are only there to make things look legit. There are very few places on earth where you can be forced into citizenship so you can be deprived of consular access and be dealt with using the convenience of Chinese rules and tools[1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sentences-bookseller-gui-...

[strogonoff]

This is insane.

China abducts a Swedish citizen; recognizes and prosecutes him as citizen of China, denying Sweden access to the trial (note that China does not even have double citizenship); when concerns are raised over violations of Vienna treaty on consular relations—and hey, by this logic China can abduct anyone anywhere—China declares that (I am not joking) consular relations are on hold until COVID-19 is resolved.

How on Earth is anyone OK with this?

[aliswe]

It's not like he is wholly unrelated to China, though. This is kinda similar to Davit Isak and probably numerous other people

[strogonoff]

I cannot locate anything about the person you refer to, but that doesn’t matter. “Not wholly unrelated” is a very weak justification for an abduction of a foreign citizen (especially where “not unrelated” means “wrote about some country’s politics”), and unilaterally declaring international consular relations “suspended”. “What about Y” does not mean X should be tolerated.

[aliswe]

Sorry mate, that got misspelled. Yes, I agree with you an all those points, but to totally disregard the fact that the person is of chinese origin and a former chinese citizen is not giving the whole picture.

In the case of Isaak, people in sweden seem to think he was some kind of stockholm journalist when he was merely swabbing the floors of a swedish news agency. Not to discredit him of course, I was actually a cleaner myself at one point ... But to simply refer to him as an "abducted swedish journalist" very much leaves the full picture unpainted. More accurately he was a political refugee in sweden and oppositional activist in eritrea, and I think he wrote a newsletter there as well or some kind of newspaper.

In any case, hope they all go free soon, poor people.

[strogonoff]

Abducted and prosecuted a Swedish citizen. The “journalist” part is not important is it?

A big difference between China and Eritrea is that one of those is a nuclear power, and it has just unilaterally declared consular relations as suspended when Sweden demanded access to its citizen. This is insane.

Global discourse about China mainland politics must be bias-corrected in a way that people with strong opinions and actual knowledge of how things work there will likely self-censor, unless they align with CCP.

If no one writes about some damning thing X in the US, there is a high likelihood that X doesn’t happen. If no one writes about damning thing Z in China, this tells us nothing. They could just fear for their lives—and it doesn’t matter where that person lives, which country’s citizen they are, whether they have been granted asylum, etc.

[iddqd]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawit_Isaak

[strogonoff]

Yep, as I thought… Two wrongs don’t make a right.