Causeway Bay Books shareholder Lee Bo (李波), who went missing three months ago and surfaced in China, is already on his way back over the border after a brief return home, local media reported.
British citizen Lee, 65, returned to Hong Kong on Thursday after disappearing in late December last year, in a case that has raised alarm over Beijing’s tightening grip of the territory.
Lee crossed back into mainland China yesterday afternoon, less than 24 hours after his arrival on Thursday.
Photo: AP
“It’s a release with Chinese characteristics,” China expert Willy Lam (林和立) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong told reporters.
“The fact of the matter is that he has not really been fully released ... he needs to report back to China,” Lam said.
Lee is one of five Hong Kong booksellers who went “missing” in recent months — the other four are now under criminal investigation in mainland China, linked to trading illegal books in China.
The men all worked for Mighty Current publishing house, which produced salacious titles about political intrigue and love affairs at the highest levels of Chinese politics. Lee’s case caused the greatest outcry, because he was the only bookseller to disappear from Hong Kong, prompting accusations that Chinese law enforcement agents were operating in the semi-autonomous city, illegal under its constitution.
Three of the other booksellers went missing from southern China and one from Thailand in October. Lee had returned to Hong Kong on Thursday, where he insisted a missing-person case on him should be dropped and that he was a free man.
He told Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing Phoenix TV that he “may need to return to the mainland multiple times to assist in the investigation.”
Yesterday morning, Lee told reporters he would go back to China with his wife to pay respects to his ancestors.
Lee also said he might seek medical care for his autistic son in mainland China.
“Before, there was a time I was afraid to go back to the mainland, because I heard that some people had got into trouble because of these books,” Lee said outside his Hong Kong apartment block.
“The problems have been solved,” he added.
Asked whether he had been taken to China by security agents, Lee answered: “It’s not convenient for me to say.”
After he left his apartment yesterday, Lee was escorted into the back of a black van. Soon afterward, he was spotted at the border.
“It’s now becoming a pattern, it really just makes it even harder to believe that the so-called released booksellers actually have freedom,” Amnesty International China researcher William Nee (倪偉平) said.
Mighty Current co-owner Gui Minhai (桂民海), a Swedish citizen, confessed in a television interview last month to trying to smuggle illegal books into China.
Mighty Current employee Cheung Jiping (張志平), Mighty Current general manager Lui Bo (呂波) and Causeway Bay Books manager Lam Wing-kei (林榮基) blamed the company’s allegedly illegal book trade on Gui.
Cheung and Lui returned to Hong Kong earlier this month on bail, but are reported to have quickly gone back to mainland China.
The case has drawn international criticism, with Britain saying it believes Lee had been “involuntarily removed” to mainland China in a “serious breach” of an agreement signed before Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, which protects the city’s freedoms for 50 years.
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