The New York Times, 26 January 2016

By Chris Buckley and Thomas Fuller – A Chinese journalist who was traveling across Thailand on a frantic quest for political refuge messaged his wife recently to say that he would soon reach the border with Laos. Two weeks ago, the journalist, Li Xin, disappeared.

Mr. Li’s wife, He Fangmei, and his supporters believe he has joined a growing list of people at odds with Beijing who have been spirited intoChina across borders, especially from Thailand.

“I haven’t heard any word from him,” Ms. He said on Monday after deciding to speak out about her husband’s disappearance. “Now, Thailand and China are kicking the ball back and forth.”

Security agencies in Beijing appear determined to stamp out the idea that citizens who defy the Chinese government, including dissidents and officials charged with corruption, can find safety abroad — and the examples of secretive handovers to China from Thailand are multiplying.

Thailand’s military rulers, for their part, appear to be seeking economic and political backing from Beijing in return for security and police cooperation, including in secretive extraditions, analysts say.

“The government is desperate to make friends with a powerful player,” said Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher on Thailand for Human Rights Watch who is critical of the deportations because they bypass the legal system. “This is a very spine-chilling precedent set by the junta. Thailand is no longer a safe haven.”

The recent acceleration of deportations to China from Thailand began in July, when the Thai government returned about 100 members of the Uighur ethnic minority, a largely Sunni Muslim people whose homeland in northwest China has become increasingly tense.

The Uighurs who were handed over by Thailand had traveled there hoping to be settled in third countries, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called their deportation a “flagrant violation of international law.”

In October, Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong book publisher who specialized in potboilers about China’s Communist elite, disappeared from his vacation home in the Thai coastal town of Pattaya. He emerged on Chinese television this month offering a confession for having left China in 2003, violating probation after an automobile accident in which the car he was driving struck and killed a young woman.

In November, two Chinese dissidents seeking sanctuary in Thailand, Jiang Yefei and Dong Guanping, were sent back to China despite having been recognized as refugees by the United Nations refugee agency. The Chinese police later said that the men had been in Thailand without authorization and were suspected of crimes involving illegal border crossing.

“The transfer procedure for the two was in accordance with a cooperation mechanism between Chinese and Thai police,” Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said, citing the police.

The spokesman for the Thai government could not be reached on Monday.

Panitan Wattanayagorn, an adviser to the deputy prime minister, said he was not aware of the disappearance of Mr. Li, the journalist. Speaking more generally about deportations, he said that Thailand had to be aware of and responsive to China’s rising influence in trade, investment and tourism.

“Several years ago, the number of Chinese tourists here was not even one million,” Mr. Panitan said. “Now it’s approaching 10 million.”

He emphasized that Thailand must continue to rely on the United States for security cooperation. In the military sphere, “The U.S. is still No. 1,” he said.

The Chinese government has said that suspects of crimes who return from abroad, including officials and their relatives accused of graft, have often come back voluntarily, offering extravagant contrition for their misdeeds. But critics say the secretive operations are likely to involve coercion and threats, if not outright force, and they point to the far-fetched accounts that detainees have given in the Chinese state-run news media.

Ms. He said her husband feared that if he was forced to go back to China, he would be punished for having publicly recounted the intense pressure that state security officers had used to recruit him as an informant against his colleagues and friends, and for having described censorship he witnessed in his job as an editor. He said the security agents had threatened to charge him with spying unless he agreed to act as an informant.

Mr. Li had been an editor for the website of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a popular Chinese newspaper.

“I didn’t want him to go to Thailand,” Ms. He said.

Friends who have asked about his fate in Thailand have received no news, she said, nor had his father, who had reported his disappearance to the local police in Henan Province.

She said she last heard from Mr. Li two weeks ago, when he sent a message by phone saying that he was walking toward Thailand’s northeastern frontier with Laos after taking a train from Bangkok. “Left the train and heading toward the border,” said his last message, which reached his wife while she was asleep.

Mr. Li had first gone to India, apparently hoping to obtain a visa to the United States, where he intended to apply for asylum. Failing that, he hoped to extend his stay in India. He succeeded at neither, and decided to go to Thailand. There, he hoped to receive official status as a refugee and qualify for settlement in another country, Ms. He said. To do that, he had to leave Thailand and re-enter with a new tourist visa.

“He planned to apply for refugee status after coming back to Thailand,” said Ms. He. The couple has a 2-year-old son and is expecting another child.

There appears to have been no news from Mr. Li since Jan. 11. Before he disappeared, he told journalists that he feared persecution if he returned to China.

“Is he still in another country, or has he been handed over to the Chinese Communist Party?” his wife wrote in an account of his disappearance that she shared online.

A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Beijing referred questions about the case to Washington.

Mr. Sunai of Human Rights Watch said the renditions of Chinese citizens back to China were symbolic of a shift in Thailand.

In 2003, when Bangkok and Washington were closer allies, the Thai government allowed the rendition of Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian known as Hambali, who is believed to have been the mastermind behind the 2002 nightclub attacks in Bali that killed more than 200 people.

Now, Bangkok is obliging Beijing, Mr. Sunai said. Thailand, he said, “has changed from one major ally to another.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world/asia/china-thailand-li-xin.html