Just Saying | Hong Kong is no longer important: Missing booksellers case proves we have become insignificant in Beijing’s eyes
Yonden Lhatoo says Beijing’s contempt for Hong Kong is apparent in the case of five missing booksellers and its implications for the city’s autonomy
Wasn’t it former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) who declared that Hong Kong people are “sometimes naive”? That was back in 2000 when he was berating a group of young Hong Kong journalists for asking provocative questions.
More than 15 years and two presidents later, it looks like the powers that be in Beijing have decided we’re not only “sometimes naive” but utterly clueless and incapable of logical thought.
How else can you explain the willing suspension of disbelief they expect of us – not only journalists, but the entire population – regarding their piecemeal and dubious explanations about the disappearance of five local booksellers who specialised in pulp publications criticising China’s ruling Communist Party?
Three of them went missing on the mainland and a fourth in Thailand in October, while the fifth vanished from Hong Kong at the end of December.
So far, Beijing seems unperturbed by the feverish speculation across the city that the booksellers were kidnapped by mainland security agents, which would be a serious violation of Hong Kong’s autonomy.
After studiously ignoring our government’s feeble enquiries for weeks, Beijing paraded publisher Gui Minhai on state television. His teary-eyed “confession” was a cock-and-bull story about turning himself in to mainland authorities because he felt remorseful over a fatal car accident he was involved in 12 years ago. He was apparently hit by a belated twinge of conscience that inexplicably coincided with the disappearance of his publishing associates.