As we enter 2018, Peter Dahlin, the Swedish rights activist, who was himself a victim of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location in Beijing in early 2016, writes about his friend and rights lawyer, Wang Quanzhang. More than two and a half years after he was first kidnapped by the Chinese state, Wang still languishes in secret detention.

One lawyer, one scholar and one Swedish human rights advocate share the same fate: they were all kidnapped and disappeared by the Chinese state. Locked for weeks and months in secret jails, completely cut off from the world and forced to confess on camera for crimes they did not commit.