GUI Minhai

A poet, author, publisher, bookseller and member of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPC), Gui Minhai is a Swedish citizen serving a 10-year prison sentence following his conviction on national security charges on 24 February 2020 (see Case Lists 2015-2025). In August 2025, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Gui’s detention constitutes an ‘arbitrary deprivation of liberty’ and called on China to release him, provide compensation, and investigate the circumstances of his detention. 

Gui is one of five Hong Kong booksellers who were forcibly disappeared in late 2015. He was abducted from his vacation home in Thailand by Chinese security services and was not seen in public for three months, until Chinese state media aired a forced confession in which Gui claimed to have voluntarily returned to China to turn himself in for a 2003 traffic offence. Briefly released under continued surveillance in late 2017, Gui was detained again by plain-clothes police officers on 20 January 2018 while travelling with two Swedish diplomats to Beijing for medical testing for a neurodegenerative disease. In July 2024, PEN International called for Gui Minhai’s release during the adoption of China’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council. 

Gui Minhai, born on 5 May 1964, was the owner of Mighty Current Media and joint owner of its retail arm, Causeway Bay Books. Mighty Current Media was a Hong Kong-based publishing company best known for its sensationalist books on the private lives of China’s political leadership, while Causeway Bay Books was a popular destination for readers seeking titles banned or otherwise unavailable in mainland China. A prolific author prior to his arrest, Gui wrote several poems during his initial detention, which were published in 2020 as a poetry collection titled I Draw a Door on the Wall with My Finger (2020). In 2019, he was awarded PEN Sweden’s Tucholsky Prize.