China expels Swedish student over blog post

A Swedish student in China had his visa revoked after he called on his blog for a protest in Shanghai in support of freedom of expression, Swedish public radio reported Saturday. "I have long wanted to try to organise a small, small event that at the same time could attract a little attention from the paranoid authorities," Sven Englund, 24, wrote on his Swedish blog on July 1, as the Chinese Communist Party was celebrating its 90th anniversary. On a separate blog in Chinese, he invited Chinese President Hu Jintao to a so-called 'flash mob' protest, according to the radio report. Participants were asked to write the Chinese symbol for "freedom" somewhere on their body before going to a central spot in Shanghai and standing there for five minutes. It remains unclear if the event took place as Englund was being interrogated by police at its scheduled time on July 2, according to a later post on his Swedish blog. They had taken his passport and pressured him to post a blog entry calling off the event, which he did, stating the protest may be illegal as he had not applied for a permit. "If anyone goes there, it is their own responsibility," he wrote. This was apparently not enough. On Friday, Englund was informed that his student visa had been revoked and early Saturday, according to his feed on micro-blogging site Twitter, he was put on a plane out of the country.