About Gui Minhai

Gui Minhai (桂敏海) was born on May 5, in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China.  At the age of 17, he moved to Beijing to study history at Peking University.  During this time as a student, he developed an interest in poetry and spent much of his time writing.  After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he worked as an editor at the People’s Education Press until 1988, when he moved to Sweden for postgraduate study, and later work, at the University of Gothenburg.  Following the Tiananmen massacre, Gui was granted permanent residency in Sweden in 1989.  Gui was naturalised as a citizen of Sweden in 1992.

After working in China for five years, Gui moved to Germany in 2004 and started working as an author for publishers of books on the Chinese government.  In 2006, Gui joined the Independent Chinese PEN Centre — the Chinese chapter of PEN International — where he became involved with its campaigns for freedom of speech in China, attending and speaking at various human rights conferences.  Gui tried to return to China in 2008 to visit his family, but was refused entry.

In 2012, Gui established Mighty Current Media in Hong Kong, a publisher and distributor of books specialising in mainland Chinese politics and the lives of Chinese politicians.  Mighty Current bought Causeway Bay Bookstore in 2014.

Gui Minhai was last seen on October 17, 2015, when he left his holiday apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, with a man in a striped shirt who was speaking Chinese on his phone.  Since then he has been in detention in mainland China without legal assistance or consular access.  Chinese authorities only admitted to having detained Gui in January 2016, after state-controlled TV channel CCTV aired a forced confession video of him saying he had killed a girl in a traffic accident in 2003, and that he had returned to China voluntarily to turn himself in for this.  Other than this, no information on his status or whereabouts has been given to his family nor to Swedish authorities.