Every once in a while people ask me about it. Journalists and diplomats who talk to me for the first time usually open with it. When I meet new people I don’t mention it at all, and yet somehow the next time I see them they know all about it: the “confession” I was forced to make on Chinese television in 2016.

The Chinese media has been long known to work with the state, or rather, China’s Communist Party, to spread propaganda. It is now clear that the media outlets have also become active players in China’s foreign policy. I didn’t think about it that way when I first viewed, in extreme discomfort, my own televised confession. At the time, I thought of the scene as mere propaganda and an attempt to scare other foreign human rights workers.

But in February, when I watched Gui Minhai, a brave independent bookseller and a fellow Swede, paraded for the third time in front of the media, it became clear: These televised confessions are actually weapons of foreign policy.