Brilliant. It's sad it lends itself so easily to spin, "The Chinese Turned Him!" I expect that is what Americans will be told to believe.

But on top of that you have the fact that "The Chinese could offer him asylum in exchange for classified information" is a decent deterrent for them even asking.

Additionally, suppose they ask China for extradition and China offers protection in exchange for information. Then Snowden has several useful options. He could suggest that the US back off so he doesn't have to make a decision. He could give in to the Chinese. He could turn himself in and issue a public statement that if the only way he could stay in Hongkong was to sell out his country he would rather face jail.

Even the third option (turning himself in) would be very possibly something that would work in his defence. That is hard to spin against him, "He's so patriotic he'd rather go to jail than sell out his country."

But i mean it's curious he did this right as the Chinese PM was visiting Obama, no?

No is not. To you maybe, but not to me. It just looks like a coincidence and that is like I will take it until further evidence emerges. Otherwise we just look like the religious morons whom claim that their religious text is the correct one because it predicted a historical event somewhere in the last two thousand years.

Very curious.

There was actually an article upvoted on HackerNews a few days ago which supposed, even before Snowden revealed himself, that these leaks were the result of Chinese intelligence activity.

The difference here is that Snowden is going to be wanted for criminal charges, not political ones, so his case for pleading asylum is very, very weak.

It's like someone being accused of murder and trying to seek asylum in another country (I'm not saying that what he did is identical to murder, just pointing out what "criminal" means here).

Most oppressive regimes will make sure that dissidents also get criminal charges (fabricated or not), so then you could just as well remove the concept of asylum entirely. Hardly any country has political charges after all.

The concept of murder may not be as obvious as you think. If an American murder fled to Norway, he will likely not get asylum, but Norwegian authorities can't extradict him to the US, because they are not allowed to do that when there is a possibility of capital penalty. The same is the case for many other European nations.

No one is ever wanted for "political charges". There are civil charges, and there are criminal charges. When the state is the prosecutor, it is very often (though not always) a criminal charge.

When requesting asylum, the requester makes the claim that the charges (of whatever kind) are politically motivated - which may or may not stick in snowden's case. I have no knowledge of the history of extraditions in such matters.

Agreed.

He's also rolling the dice in a major way. Although the asylum laws are sort of up in the air in Hong Kong right now, they could just decide to detain him and put him in jail during the process. Worse still, since China has sovereignty, they could ship him back to China and use him as trade bait with the US.

It doesn't matter because you still have to have someone deny his asylum application, something which there is no protocol for at the moment in HK.

Could you please characterize the difference between "criminal charges" vs "political ones"?

Politically motivated criminal charges. Political asylum.