Hong Kong unsettled by strange case of missing booksellers

In a written statement released last night, police said: “Officers of the Regional Missing Person Unit of Hong Kong Island have also contacted the informant”.

The chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, Albert Ho Chun-yan, said yesterday: “To my knowledge, no one was able to reach Mrs Lee today”.

Last month four other employees of the same bookshop and publishing house, including its owner, went missing.

The publishing company’s general manager Lui Bo, an employee Cheung Jiping and bookstore manager Lam Wing-kei are also reportedly missing after disappearing in southern China in October.

Lee’s bookstore was popular among tourists from mainland China as a source of salacious books about the country’s elite banned on the mainland.

All 5 men worked for publishing firm Mighty Current, which is rumoured to have been about to launch a book on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s former girlfriend.

Lee was a shareholder in Causeway Bay Books, whose tabloid paperbacks are highly critical of the Chinese leadership, Reuters reported. “This book has not yet gone to print, but probably it has something to do with this book”, he said, according to Agence France-Presse.

Protesters marched to Beijing’s Liaison Office Sunday to demand information about Lee, Mighty Current’s chief editor.

The disappearances have fuelled lingering concerns that China is using shadowy and illegal tactics in the former British colony, whose constitution guarantees rule of law and freedom of expression.

On Monday, Chief Executive Leung called reporters to his office to “state solemnly” that, under the Basic Law, only Hong Kong’s law enforcement agencies have the legal authority to enforce laws in Hong Kong.

Lee Bo, 65, a major shareholder of Causeway Bay Books, “vanished” on Wednesday after he went to fetch books from his warehouse in the city, his wife told Hong Kong media.

In a commentary yesterday, mainland tabloid Global Times claimed the disappearance of Lee was just media hype and aimed to smear “one country, two systems”.

On Monday, Gui’s daughter told Hong Kong’s Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper she contacted police in the United Kingdom over Lee’s disappearance since he had once told her he was a British citizen. She said he told her then that he was “assisting an investigation” and alluded to the earlier disappearances, but was not more specific. “He said “yes”, regarding that case where a few others had gone missing”, Choi said.

Hong Kong is semi-autonomous after being handed back to China by Britain in 1997 and enjoys freedoms unseen on the mainland.

Looking to raise worldwide attention about the current situation in Hong Kong, Agnes Chow Ting, prominent member of the Hong Kong student activist group Scholarism, is speaking out on the curious case of the missing local bookseller.

He added that the police actively conducted investigations into this missing person report, and they have finished examining CCTV footage around the location where the missing person was last seen.

Many in Hong Kong are anxious that mainland officials took the bookstore owner across the border in a rendition-style action.