My day job is teaching international maritime law at the University of Swansea, so largely a non-political world.
But I also have a second career as a commentator, posting on social media and writing columns like this.
And to that end, I've sometimes had cause to mention China's repression — its genocide, even — of its Muslim Uighur minority, its actions in Taiwan, and the rest of Beijing's ugly catalogue of human-rights abuses.
Normally, my work as a law professor and as a polemicist are worlds apart. But not always.
A couple of years ago, an acquaintance told me that she had learnt that a local representative of the Chinese Communist Party in Dalian, a city of 7.5 million people in eastern China, regarded me as not entirely trustworthy.
