A packet of cigarettes and boxes of medication, neatly divided into daily doses, still sit on the desk where Gui Minhai would write his political gossip books on China’s leaders.

A drill and tools lie on the kitchen top from an unfinished DIY project. A dozen eggs freshly bought but now nearly two months old decay in the fridge, and a metal coat hanger moulded into the words “home” waits unmounted in a plastic bag.



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Gui’s 17th-storey apartment – with perfect views towards the Gulf of Thailand – is empty now. His bed was unmade the day he vanished.

A successful Hong Kong publisher, Gui is one of four members of Sage Communications — famed for sensational tomes on the private lives of China’s elite — to go missing. But unlike his colleagues, who were abducted in China, Gui vanished in Thailand.

Since his suspected abduction, Gui has been in on-off contact with his wife, daughter and the building manager from the luxury Thai condominium, although he never reveals his location and calls from phone lines are diverted through foreign countries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Thailand apartment of Gui Minhai, virtually unchanged since the day he vanished. Photograph: Oliver Holmes/The Guardian

China’s expatriate critics have long avoided the mainland but Beijing — which unlike the US and Russia does not have a long history of cloak-and-dagger activities outside its borders — is increasingly tracking down opponents abroad.

Chinese president Xi Jinping launched Operation Fox Hunt last year to repatriate Chinese fugitives abroad and has since brought home hundreds of people wanted by Beijing, mostly on corruption charges.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The apartment block in the Thai beach resort town of Pattaya where Gui Minhai lived. Photograph: Oliver Holmes/The Guardian

The campaign has drawn ire from Washington, which says covert agents have been secretly operating out of the US, and has also upset officials in Australia, another of Xi’s key hunting grounds.

While it is not certain that Gui, also a naturalised Swedish citizen, was smuggled back to China by the government, his disappearance spotlights the danger for China’s targets, particularly in Thailand where the willing-to-please junta has deported more than 100 people wanted by Beijing this year.

An investigation by the Guardian has found that despite CCTV footage of the men suspected of kidnapping Gui and requests from the Swedish government to help find him, there is very little to suggest Thai authorities are following up on the case at all.

A member of the management team at the condominium, a mammoth pillared structure on the beach in the Thai resort town Pattaya with attached tennis courts and pool, told the Guardian that apart from a Bangkok-based friend of Gui’s no one had inquired in person or on the phone about his disappearance.

On his last morning, she said, a man who did not speak fluent Thai and speaking Chinese on the phone waited at the apartment gates while Gui was out buying groceries.

When Gui returned, he parked the car in the driveway, briefly spoke to the man and then told the security guard to deliver the shopping to his apartment, the manager said. The unidentified man got in Gui’s car and they drove out, security footage showed.

A few hours later, in the first of several bizarrely mundane calls she would receive from Gui or his assumed captors during his suspected abduction, he called the desk and asked her to put the fruit in the fridge and lock all the windows.

The next call was two weeks later, when he said a friend would pick up his computer. A day later, four men — captured on CCTV dressed casually with only one wearing a hat and sunglasses — arrived at the building.

“Only two could speak Thai,” the manager said, speaking to the Guardian on rattan chairs in the open-air lobby, feet away from where Gui drove off. They wrote Chinese names in the log book and brought a note they said was written by Gui giving them permission to take the computer.

They spent 26 minutes in the apartment, camera footage in the elevator showed, but left the Mac on Gui’s desk. They later called to say the airconditioning had accidentally been left on.

Only days later did the manager hear that Gui was uncontactable. She immediately retrieved the number the men had used to call her and dialled it.

“A taxi driver picked up. He said that that phone was left in the car by four men.” The driver said they were trying to negotiate a price for a taxi to Poipet, a Cambodian border town notorious for its bribable immigration officials.

She received one more call from Gui but he hung up after she asked if he was safe.

The Guardian called three phone numbers Gui had used to call the manager. One was from Croatia, another from Poland and the last from Togo. All were disconnected. The number the four men used was Thai, but also cut off.

The salacious publisher

As a publisher of the thinly-sourced, tabloid-style political books which pack the shelves of Hong Kong bookstores but are outlawed in mainland China, Gui, 51, became a major thorn in the Communist party’s side.

His salacious and, many suspect, largely fabricated tales focused on the private lives of senior party leaders.

The books chronicled the alleged sexual escapades of Bo Xilai, the disgraced party chief of Chongqing whose wife, Gu Kailai, was jailed for the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood. They took on Zhou Yongkang, China’s once feared security tsar who was jailed for life for corruption earlier this year. Even Chinese president Xi Jinping found his name dragged into Gui’s pages, with one recent book entitled The Collapse of Xi Jinping in 2017.

Lee Bo, Gui’s Hong Kong-based business partner, said his friend had been responsible for publishing about 200 books in the last nine years. “He’s quite prolific,” he said, denying, however, that Gui was on a political mission against the Communist party.

“He’s mainly a businessman. Publishing to him is a means of earning money rather than ideology,” he said. “In his books there is a lot of guessing also about political gossip rather than actual fact.”

Gui had done well out of his almost decade-long career in publishing. He owned homes in Hong Kong and Germany and in late 2014 acquired his retreat in Pattaya.

Lee Bo had been invited to spend next year’s Chinese New Year there with his wife. “It was in a good environment, in front of a beach, with a 180-degree sea view and it was quite cheap compared to properties in Hong Kong. He thought it was a really good buy.

“We don’t know what happened and we don’t know who has taken him, whether they were Chinese or Thai. Nothing is clear,” Lee Bo said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gui Minhai, whose salacious and, many suspect, largely fabricated books irritated Communist party cadres, in an undated picture. Photograph: Bei Ling/Independent Chinese PEN Center

However, three theories for why Gui disappeared have emerged.

One is that the apparent abduction was linked to a particularly racy book Gui had been preparing to send to the printers. Some believe powerful mainland figures may have ordered members of the Chinese mafia in Pattaya to snatch the publisher.

“So we all suspect it has something to do with his upcoming book,” Lee said. Gui had kept the contents of the book a complete secret. “Nobody knows. Not even the name do we know.

“I think it must be one of his books or many [of his] books offended some high ranking Chinese officials, possibly Chinese leaders,” he added.

Asked how senior members of the Communist party felt about Gui, Lee said: “Certainly they don’t like him. But to publish this kind of book which is critical of the Chinese regime is not unusual in Hong Kong … Why is Mr Gui singled out? Probably he has some kind of books – or a book – the Chinese leadership must get rid of. It’s the only reason I can think of.”

Another source in Hong Kong’s publishing industry said many believed Gui’s disappearance was the result of a “personal vendetta” by powerful mainland figures who had been irritated by Gui’s books. “They see him as a nuisance,” said the source, who declined to be named. “They take it personally.”

Others in the dissident community believe it was the government itself that ordered Gui’s abduction.

The Cambodia theory

Bei Ling, a Chinese dissident who lives in the US, first met Gui in 1984 at Peking University. They were both young poets.



“I cannot say he is in China for sure because we don’t have any real evidence. But all these things make me very easily imagine this is the case.” He said Gui thought Thailand would be a safe place to work.

The key detail in the story, Bei Ling believes, is the taxi to Poipet. “The captors wanted to get to Cambodia to easily get him back to China.”

Only a few days after the four men visited Gui’s apartment — ostensibly to retrieve the computer they never picked up — Cambodia deported 168 Chinese suspects it said were involved in an internet and phone scam back to China on two planes sent from Beijing.

“It make sense,” Bei Ling says. “They went to the apartment to get the passport, not the computer. Then they would send Gui back to China through Cambodia on the plane of criminals.”

But it is also possible that Gui disappeared himself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bookshop at Hong Kong airport stocked with dozens of salacious tomes about China’s top leaders, including one by Gui Minhai predicting the downfall of president Xi Jinping. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

Gui’s daughter, who asked not to use her first name, said she received a peculiar Skype message from her father after he went missing saying he would transfer money, which did later arrive in her account.

“I hadn’t asked for money and he didn’t address my previous messages asking him where he was and if he was OK.

“He has been calling his wife, my stepmother, regularly telling her that he is fine but not answering any questions regarding his whereabouts.”

But she said she doesn’t think Gui orchestrated his disappearance. “We were planning to talk again a couple days after he went missing. I’m fairly sure if he had planned to do that, he would have told me.”

Gabriel Wernstedt from the Swedish ministry of foreign affairs told the Guardian its embassies in Bangkok and Beijing are investigating and had “raised the issue with high-level Thai representatives”.

But police captain Pichitpong Yodpikul in Pattaya said that while a daily log had been recorded, the police cannot act until a family member files an official police report. A copy of the daily log seen by the Guardian said Gui’s family “are afraid that he is in danger”.

Gui’s daughter said Swedish police had already filed a report through Interpol: “Interpol were supposed to put pressure on Thailand.”



When told that not a single police officer or government official had visited the apartment, she said: “The fact that nobody has been down, that is worrying.”

Requests for comment sent by the Guardian to the Thai ministry of foreign affairs and a Thai government spokesman were unsuccessful.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the ministry of foreign affairs in Beijing, declined to comment when asked if the Chinese government had any information on Gui’s disappearance or whereabouts. She also declined to comment on the suggestion that the Chinese government might have been involved in Gui’s detention.

“I’m not aware of the specific case that you mentioned,” Hua told the Guardian on Monday.

Ditching Washington for Beijing

Under Thailand’s coup leaders, the country has strengthened ties with China, including signing an agreement to boost joint military engagement and intelligence sharing over the next five years.

Last month, Thai and Chinese military conducted joint air force drills. A Chinese-built rail network through Thailand is being planned while Bangkok looks likely to spend $1bn on Chinese submarines.

With Washington speaking out on human rights, a thinned-skinned military junta in power means Bangkok is looking to Beijing. Despite Obama calling for a “pivot” to Asia, the relationship with Thailand is souring.

Asked by the Guardian about Chinese influence in southeast Asia, US ambassador Glyn Davies said it was a “good thing” for Thailand to have a healthy relationship with China. He said: “We haven’t lost Thailand.”

Last month, Thailand deported two veteran Chinese dissidents and registered refugees back to China, angering rights groups and the UN. And in July, it deported about 100 ethnic Uighur Muslims back to China. The UNHCR said at the time that the expulsion was “a flagrant violation of international law”.

The Chinese ambassador to Thailand Ning Fukui said this month that the deportation of the two Chinese men “followed security cooperation between the two countries.”

“China is Thailand’s number one trade partner … I have felt true brotherhood with Thai people,” he said.

Paul Chambers, director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs, said the deportations show Thailand’s willingness “to curry favour with a Chinese regime which is all too willing to violate any laws of the world simply to silence dissent and freedom of speech against its domestic critics.

“The Thai dictatorship will talk the talk of protecting human rights and cracking down on human trafficking but it will not walk the walk,” he said. “Most probably, Thailand’s relations with China will continue to improve while those with the US will deteriorate.”

A recent editorial by the Bangkok Post wrote “every Thai knows the government is bowing to China’s demands” and Thailand’s former foreign minister in July said if his Chinese counterpart “were a woman I will fall in love with his excellency.”

More covert operations might have taken place, too. In October, the 16-year-old son of a prominent human rights lawyer at the centre of a Chinese government crackdown disappeared while attempting to flee to the US through southeast Asia.

He never made it to his Bangkok rendezvous and was subsequently returned to his grandmother’s home in Inner Mongolia. He now lives there under the watch of Chinese security agents.

Meanwhile on the Gulf of Thailand in Gui’s empty apartment, his cigarettes remain unsmoked and his pills unconsumed. A rucksack sprawls open on a coffee table, a perhaps unnoticed clue in a what appears to be a non-existent investigation.