BEIJING — To Germans, he was the mysterious “refugee who wasn’t,” a 30-year-old man from Jilin Province in China who somehow got mistaken for a refugee and was swept up into Germany’s vast processing system for two weeks.

That fate befell him even after German officials discovered — with the aid of a local Chinese restaurant worker and a translation app — that the man was not applying for asylum, but instead hoped to roam Europe as a tourist.

On social media on Tuesday, Chinese commenters highlighted what they viewed as either the courage or the naïveté of their fellow citizen, who apparently traveled alone to Europe speaking only Mandarin. Others felt that the man, still unidentified, secretly intended to emigrate.

The man’s odyssey apparently began at the Stuttgart airport on July 4. There, said Christoph Schlütermann, the German Red Cross official who eventually unraveled the mystery, he had been robbed of his wallet. He turned to airport police officers for help, but with the language barrier they evidently mistook him for someone seeking asylum, Mr. Schlütermann said.