Missing booksellers have Hong Kong leader ‘highly concerned’

The U.K. government is pressing China for information about a Hong Kong-based publisher and U.K. passport holder who disappeared last week from the former British colony, while China warned against speculating over the missing man’s fate.

Her withdrawal came after Lee contacted a colleague, in a faxed letter published by Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

Lee Bo, 65, a shareholder of Causeway Bay Books, “vanished” last week, according to a missing person’s report filed by his wife last Thursday.

Tang spoke to CNN within the tight confines of the People’s Bookstore, his book-lined shop and coffee-house perched overlooking Hong Kong’s high octane Causeway Bay commercial district.

Such abductions are very rare in Hong Kong, which – unlike the authoritarian mainland – enjoys freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the rule of law.

Another man, Gui Minhai, the author of tabloid-style exposes on Chinese leaders and the owner of Mighty Current, the publishing house that owns the Causeway Bay bookstore, was last seen publicly in the Thai seaside town of Pattaya.

But the plot thickened yesterday, with Ms Choi saying she now believes her husband had travelled to the mainland voluntarily.

However, an editorial printed in the Global Times newspaper, a mouthpiece for the Chinese government, on Tuesday, said some were trying to “hype” the incident and turn it into a political issue “to create estrangement between Hong Kong and the mainland”.

Hong Kong: The wife of a missing Hong Kong bookseller feared detained by Chinese authorities has retracted her report to police on his disappearance in a move Amnesty said smacked of “intimidation” tactics by China. The email said Britain was “deeply concerned” about the case and has “urgently requested” help from local authorities for information on the individual.

Mr Lee’s disappearance has triggered an outcry in a procedure similar to wonderful performance – in Hong Kong, where some suspect he might happen to be kidnapped and transported from the other side of the border to mainland China. However critics of these theories have said that the unconfirmed rumours of mainland involvement are harming Hong Kong and its relations with China.

It is learnt that the publishing house had been planning on publishing a book about the “love affairs” of China’s President Xi Jinping during his time working “in the provinces”.

There has been no official comment from the Chinese government on Mr Lee’s case. “Our view is that … in a question of any breach of Hong Kong laws, the question must be settled in Hong Kong by the Hong Kong judicial system”, he said. “I think given Hong Kong’s closeness to the mainland, people could get away easily by getting on a boat”.

However, Britain is not the only European country that has expressed alarm at the recent disappearances. She said he told her then that he was “assisting an investigation” and alluded to the earlier disappearances, but was not more specific. “What we see in mainland China all the time is that police and state security put enormous pressure on family members not to speak to media and not to raise a fuss on social media”.

The disappearances could be an attempt by Beijing to coerce Mighty Current and prevent it from publishing The Lovers of Xi Jinping, which was reported to be a future project of the company. It accused the Hong Kong media of “maliciously” stirring up conflict. The titles are banned in the mainland, where the news media and the publishing industry are tightly controlled by the governing Communist Party.

He said this provocation worked against the One Country, Two Systems by which Hong Kong and the mainland coexisted.