> And by disclosing that he possesses documents that he says describe U.S. hacking against China, he appeared to be trying to win support from the Chinese government.
China is known to be active in hacking attempts against US government and US industrial targets. They would therefore be greatly interested in any inside information they could get about US defenses against such attempts.
The NSA would likely have information on those defenses.
I would expect, then, that China would be quite interested in getting their hands on any NSA employee with a high security clearance in order to question them about those defenses. Snowden is publicly known to be a person. He likely has information that would also help China with their own internal spying programs.
And now, Snowden is letting China know that he's got even more valuable information of particular interest to them.
Given this, WHY did he pick Honk Kong to flee to? If China wants that information (and it is hard to see how they could not want it), their best move is to kidnap him and blame it on foreign agents (hinting that they think the US took him--which many people would find quite believable) and make him turn over his information to them.