One year on: Hong Kong bookseller saga leaves too many questions unanswered
The disappearance of five booksellers shocked Hong Kong, bringing into question the city’s freedoms and the value of a Hong Kong-mainland notification system
Even with the apparent return to normality for all but one of the five Hong Kong booksellers “abducted” by mainland agents a year ago, the reality of the hidden threat of repression lingers for many in the city.
The forced disappearance of the five from Causeway Bay Books climaxed exactly a year ago when Lee Po, its owner, was seen boarding a van at his Mighty Current publishing office in Chai Wan at around 6pm before he was taken across the border without any official record of his departure.
The incident raised fears for the city’s autonomy and concerns over the potential loss of freedoms and the effectiveness of the notification mechanism, whereby Hong Kong and the mainland notify each other if a resident of one is detained by the other.
After Lee’s disappearance, the city slowly woke to the realisation that the Hong Kong-born British national was in fact the last of five bookstore associates to go missing. The first was Gui Minhai, co-founder of Mighty Current and a Swedish national, who disappeared from his home in the Thai resort of Pattaya in October. He is the only one still being detained in the eastern city of Ningbo.
Watch: Bookseller Lam Wing-kee wants to live a normal life
“I think the objective of the move is to purposely tighten freedom of speech in Hong Kong, and to a certain extent it has succeeded,” said Lam Wing-kee, the only one of the five Causeway Bay Books associates to speak about his kidnapping. The other four have stayed conspicuously silent.