I’m curious what the Chinese know about these people with stolen passports. If you’ve ever been to China have to go through a big visa process before you travel just to get a visa to let you enter the country. You have to go to a Chinese consulate, fill out a long form and even include an additional passport type photographs of yourself that they keep on file... It takes at least a day to process and you have to surrender your passport to them while it is done . This is just to get a visa to enter the country....all done ahead of time so they must have a complete record....Having gone through the Chinese visa process myself I’m wonder why they couldn’t determine these passports were stolen..They were never reported stolen? If the were stolen when the true owner was out of the country a new one would of been need to get back home for the true owner so be flaged as missing.....ive done a lot of travel in that part of the world last year..and these countries check
However, Beijing has a policy whereby some passengers in transit to third countries can stay in the Chinese capital for 72 hours without a visa, so the two men may have not needed to apply for a Chinese visa if they had tickets to another destination.