Sweden Wants Answers About Its Seized Citizen. China Isn’t Giving Any.

BEIJING — China on Tuesday publicly rebuffed demands by Sweden for information on the fate of a Swedish citizen who was snatched off a train in China by plainclothes officers despite being under the protection of Swedish diplomats.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry insisted that it had no knowledge of what had happened to the seized man, Gui Minhai. Instead, it issued a warning to all diplomats not to break Chinese law, without making any specific accusations against Sweden.

“This is not a matter that falls under the purview of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” a spokeswoman for the ministry, Hua Chunying, told reporters at a regular news briefing in Beijing when asked about Gui’s seizure from the train. “I don’t understand this specific matter.”

On Monday, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it would treat the incident with “utmost seriousness,” and the Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, pressed the Chinese government to provide information about Gui, who could be gravely ill.

“The Swedish government has deep knowledge of what happened and I have summoned China’s ambassador to the ministry, and I have been promised news of Gui Minhai’s fate,” Wallstrom said in Brussels.

Gui was one of five Hong Kong-based publishers who were abducted and taken to China in 2015, setting off international condemnation. The five specialized in books that offered critical and often lurid, poorly sourced descriptions of Communist Party elite.

Gui was released in October but has been kept in China. He was living in an apartment in Ningbo, an eastern coastal city, when he traveled to Beijing for a checkup, his daughter said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s public reticence about Gui “probably indicates that the national security apparatus is calling the shots, and the foreign ministry may be out of the decision-making loop,” William Nee, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said by email.

Ever since the five publishers were taken, “the notion of ‘how this might make China look abroad’ never seemed to be a primary consideration,” Nee said.

Gui was with two Swedish diplomats on Saturday as he traveled to Beijing, where the Swedish Embassy had arranged for his medical examination. Gui was going to be checked for possible amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord, impairing muscle actions like walking and swallowing. Gui has reported problems with his hands and feet that could point to ALS.

As the train neared Beijing, about 10 plainclothes officers boarded and took Gui away, his daughter, Angela Gui, said, citing accounts from Swedish officials. Chinese officials later told Swedish officials that Gui Minhai was suspected of disclosing secrets, Angela Gui said.

“I think it is quite clear that he has been abducted again and that he’s being held somewhere at a secret location,” she told Radio Sweden on Monday. “Given his health status, that’s very worrying.”

At the Chinese Foreign Ministry briefing, the spokeswoman, Hua, declined to give details about discussions between Swedish and Chinese diplomats. She told reporters to direct their questions about Gui to another Chinese ministry, while declining to specify which one.

“Any foreigner in China, including the personnel of foreign embassies and consulates, cannot violate international and Chinese law,” Hua said. When pressed about whether Swedish diplomats were suspected of breaking laws, Hua said she was just laying out general principles.

China’s tightly controlled media mostly have not mentioned Gui’s disappearance. The exception was the English-language edition of the Global Times, a party-run tabloid, which said that if the Chinese police had taken Gui away, they must have had a good legal reason.

“The police will only inform individuals and institutions that are legally required to be notified, and is not obliged to please Western media,” the Global Times said in an editorial published online.

Gui, 53, was born in eastern China, went to study in Sweden in 1988 and became a citizen of the country in 1992. He was running a small publishing business in Hong Kong in 2015, when he disappeared from a holiday home in Thailand. He reappeared months later in detention in China.

“I want my father to be released as soon as possible, and I want him to be able to come back to Europe, and back to Stockholm,” Angela Gui said. “If he does have ALS then he doesn’t have much time left.”