Is China kidnapping Hong Kong residents?
The apparent kidnapping of publisher and bookseller Lee Bo is front-page news in Hong Kong, which suspects Chinese police may have conducted an illegal cross-border raid.
Here's a whodunit: Who's abducting the booksellers of Hong Kong?
Five booksellers from a bookstore specializing in material banned from mainland Communist China have disappeared since October, and mainland Chinese police are suspect.
That's not supposed to happen — and has raised fears that the authoritarian giant is stamping on guaranteed democratic institutions of the onetime British colony.
Under the terms of the British handover, Hong Kong was to retain its own police and criminal juristiction.
The latest missing bookseller is Lee Bo, believed kidnapped on December 30. Four other colleagues from the same bookstore disappeared from their residences in October.
In November, Lee Bo himself had told BBC News that his colleagues from the Causeway Bay Bookstore were detained by the Chinese authorities because of their publishing work.
Among the four is Gui Minhai, a China-born Swedish national and the owner of the publishing house which owns the bookstore.
Gui disappeared from his vacation home in Thailand in mid-October while he was working on a book detailing Chinese President Xi Jinping's private life.
At around 10:30 pm on December 30, Lee's wife received a phone call from her husband, who spoke in Putonghua instead of his native Cantonese.
Lee told her he was assisting in an investigation and he would not return home for a period of time.
As indicated in the phone record, the call was made from Shenzhen and his wife later found out that Lee's “homecoming card” — a travel document for entering mainland China was still at home — meaning he could not have left Hong Kong through proper immigration channels.
The Hong Kong authorities later also confirmed that Lee did not have any record of having exited the island.
Lee's wife told local press that her husband was lured by a fake book order call and went to the warehouse to collect the books.
He went missing after he left with a dozen books. The public believes that Lee was forcibly taken by mainland Chinese authorities from Hong Kong to Shenzhen.
Under the One Country/Two Systems arrangement, Hong Kong enjoys judicial independence and Chinese authorities do not have jurisdiction to operate there without prior approval.
If Lee was indeed kidnapped by mainland Chinese secret police, the judicial independence of the city may have been compromised.
On Facebook, readers were astonished by the first major news item of the New Year. Columnist Si Hing of non-profit Stand News epitomized public sentiment:
Since 2014, the mainland Chinese authorities have been cracking down on publishers of banned books in Hong Kong.
In May 2014, a Hong Kong publisher Yao Wentian was sentenced to 10 years for smuggling. His publishing house was about to release a dissident-authored title focused on Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In the same month, two Hong Kong Chinese political magazine publishers Wang Jianmin and Guo Zhongjiao were prosecuted for illegal distribution of Hong Kong publications.
As it is likely that all the missing five booksellers are now held in mainland China, the Hong Kong Journalist Association and the Independent Writer Association wrote to the Liaison Office of the Central Government demanding a full explanation:
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