According to the Chinese news article, the elderly couple from London are South African, and while the police now say they did watch a documentary in their hotel, they say the husband had terror clips on his cell phone.
According to the police investigation, the foreigners first watched a documentary in a hotel room. After some of them left, the rest proceeded to watch video clips advocating terrorism. Police later found similar videos stored in a cell phone belonging to Hoosain Ismail Jacobs, a South African national.
According to the Jacobs family spokesman:
"While the experience was distressing in the first instance, they say they were looked after at all times and treated well.
Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, is not the sticks. It's a modern technological city that expanded before its time. Some have compared it to Dubai (it's massive coal reserves created lots of millionaires very quickly.)
China is very big on spying on people. From a post I wrote in 2004:
According to state media reports, Shanghai authorities are installing video surveillance cameras and software that can detect when a computer user reads a banned site and automatically send a message to a "remote supervisory center," presumably the police. (Associated Press, June 28, 2004.)
When I was in Shanghai in 2004, a lot of websites were blocked. One night I was in my hotel room when the internet connection went down. I called the front desk and within minutes, three men in black suits with skinny ties arrived, took my laptop and returned 5 minutes later -- internet restored. At the time I thought it was great hotel service. Later, I was sure they had wanted to see what sites I had visited online or what was stored on my computer.
Even so, it never would have occurred to me that China might deport someone because they didn't approve of their online viewing habits. A lesson for those who are traveling overseas this summer, and not just to China: Nothing's private and even the tiniest, harmless things can be drastically misunderstood. While deportation is preferable to
being tortured, jailed or executed, as might happen in some other places, it is still a ridiculously exaggerated reaction.
