[URBAN NOTE] "Hong Kong Bookseller Lee Confesses to Sneaking Into China"

[rfmcdonald]

David Tweed's Bloomberg report is yet another data point highlighting the imminent end of Hong Kong's autonomy under Chinese rule.

A Hong Kong bookseller suspected of being kidnapped from the city by Chinese authorities has appeared on television, saying he clandestinely traveled to the mainland to avoid raising attention to assist police with an investigation of his colleagues.

Lee Bo, also known as Lee Po, is one of five men detained in China who are linked to a Hong Kong bookstore and its parent company Mighty Current that sell books critical of the Communist Party elite. Lee vanished from Hong Kong in late December, sparking allegations he had been abducted. Chinese police confirmed he was on the mainland in January, without explaining how he crossed the border without travel documents or passing through Hong Kong immigration.

“After what happened to Mighty Current, I wanted to secretly go to the mainland to resolve whatever issues there were with the company and then secretly go back to Hong Kong,” Lee said in an interview on Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television. “I came to the mainland to assist with the judicial investigation, and I had to incriminate some people. I was really scared that if these people found out, they would cause harm to me and my family.”

The disappearance of the booksellers fanned concerns in Hong Kong about China’s encroachment on the city’s autonomy supposedly guaranteed to the former British colony under the “One Country, Two Systems" principle hammered out when it was returned to China in 1997. The cases have also garnered international attention because Lee holds a British passport and another of the missing, Gui Minhai, has Swedish nationality, with both of those governments pressuring China for information on the men.

Gui, disappeared from Thailand in October. He re-emerged in China in January saying in a televised confession that he had voluntarily turned himself into authorities over a fatal 2004 traffic accident. Gui appeared on Beijing-backed Phoenix TV on Sunday, with a new confession. He said that he had avoided rules on importing books into China, partly by changing their covers and putting them in dark nylon bags to evade X-rays.