Just Saying | Hong Kong’s returned bookseller answers only to a higher authority – the Chinese government
Yonden Lhatoo says it’s sadly clear that after returning home, Lee Po is dealing directly with the mainland because he has no confidence in his own government
Have you ever had a small piece of food stuck in your teeth, wedged somewhere in the back, that you just can’t get out? It doesn’t constitute a medical emergency, and you can mostly tolerate it as you go about your business, though it’s a constant bother.
That’s how I feel about the far-from-solved mystery of Hong Kong’s no-longer-missing booksellers, even though the storm is fizzling out and the man at the centre of it, Lee Po, is back home, safe and sound, claiming nothing happened to him.
Look at the facts so far. Five men in Hong Kong in the business of selling cheap, gossipy books about China’s leaders that are banned on the mainland disappeared last year. One of them vanished while in Pattaya, Thailand; three on the mainland; and the fifth – Lee – in Hong Kong, where he ran a bookstore.
While many suspected they were kidnapped by mainland agents operating beyond their jurisdiction, the booksellers eventually turned up one after another across the border, all of them claiming they had gone there voluntarily and denying any abduction or coercion. The official story from Chinese authorities is that one of them, Gui Minhai (桂民海), is being investigated for smuggling banned books into the mainland while the others are “assisting” with the case.