In China, where its utterly unremarkable for one side to take hostages when financial disputes crop up, the story was no more interesting than a civil lawsuit. Given how reticent the authorities are to intervene, taking hostages is frequently seen as a better route than appealing to the courts. In fact, the courts are sympathetic to certain types of hostage taking: When debt is involved, the law considers it a lesser offense than taking hostages for ransom, and it is classed as unlawful detention instead. In practice, police often dont even consider it to be an offense at all.
In 2010, one government hospital even refused to hand over a newborn baby to his parents so they would pay up for the birth costs. The baby was kept in the hospital for more than three months.
Often, precious little can be done to protect alleged debtors from thugs, and the courts and the police are of little help. This helplessness was on full display when two Indian businessmen were taken hostage for 20 days in the Chinese trading hub of Yiwu in 2012. The case came to a head when a court ordered that the two businessmen who had been taken to court by the angry locals who had seized them be released. The enraged mob proceeded to ignore the ruling. Authorities later managed to spirit the two men to Shanghai while the case was processed.
The case, of course, stirred up alarm in India not least because an Indian diplomat sent to try to resolve the situation became caught in a violent fracas and was subsequently hospitalized. But Chinese authorities were, and still are, ill-equipped to understand the foreign perspective on these cases. Nationalistic Chinese tabloid the Global Times was oblivious to the root cause of Indians distress and was instead content to chalk it up to nationalism. The editors couldnt grasp that most countries dont see kidnapping as a legitimate response to debt.
