"Does he really think Russia would be against quietly handing him over to China for cash or favours?"
I'm sure that, as a descendent of the KGB, the FSB will have a spare cell or two in somewhere like the underground Ural mountains complex, where they or their Chinese comrades can 'help' Snowden to remember things that he would normally resist... ...and if he confesses to things that he doesn't know anything about, so what? These people really do not care about modern western findings in forensic psychology/psychiatry, that torture does not normally work, they just want to do something, and torture fits the bill; all the more since it resembles something that torturers might recognise as 'revenge' for spying.
It ought not to surprise us if Snowden gradually fades into obscurity, long before the PRC and the Russian autocracy disintegrate. Human rights? They don't know them. For his folly this man truly is on his own now.
After giving them BS, or resisting, initially he'll give them half truths and chicken feed, in order to stop whatever they do. Later, when this does not satisfy them, he'll cough. Unless of course martyrdom beckons.
Torture mostly does not work, as (e.g.) the people convicted for the Birmingham pub bombing know; they confessed to anything, anything at all, anything as long as it would get the monkey off their back. They were sleep deprived, injected with chemicals, everything that could be done short of Gestapo techniques. Decades later they were released and compensated for the misfortunes and sorrow inflicted on them by the British state's representatives. Sadly the PRC and Russian autocracy do not appear to recognise this. Indeed, as the Wikipedia pages show, many, many genuine Russian journalists (by this I do not mean people like Assange, who claims to be one) have been assassinated, such as Anna Politkovskaya ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya ).
Snowden is right in the middle of where unpleasant things happen, and these people have much in common with the PRC, culturally, methodologically, in their training. He could not have picked a worse place, indeed in which only a hypocrite could seek protection from the very agencies that are pitted against his protectors, while so many juveniles and immature easily conned fools adulate and support him.
Life would appear to be wasted on the living. Like Assange Snowden doesn't have much of one.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
