The disappearance of booksellers raises questions about Hong Kong’s autonomy 
Hong Kong, Jan. 10.─ Discretion is not a trait often associated with the glitzy shopfronts of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, but the low-key entrance to a small bookshop belies the store’s recent notoriety. Tucked between a chemist and a clothes shop, Causeway Bay Books (pictured) has become the centre of a mystery involving alleged kidnappings by Chinese secret agents, and of a fierce debate in Hong Kong about the former British colony’s autonomy under Chinese rule.
The door to the shop, up two flights of stairs, is now locked. The trickle of people going up are journalists and passers-by curious for news about five men connected with the shop who have disappeared in recent months. Many Hong Kongers fear that agents from China’s mainland may have been involved, and that the men were targeted because of the shop’s gossipy books. Titles recently on sale include “The Collapse of [President] Xi Jinping in 2017” and “Xi Jinping and the Elders: War at the Top”.
When China took Hong Kong back from Britain in 1997, it agreed to give the territory a “high degree of autonomy”. Outspoken critics of the Communist Party remained free to air their views without fear of being “disappeared” by police, as commonly happens to their counterparts on the mainland. Hence huge public interest in this case. “The midnight knock on the door is not something we have had to worry about in Hong Kong,” wrote a columnist in the territory’s leading English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post (recently bought by a mainland businessman). “But if we do now, that would be the end of our way of life.”
Worries about skulduggery by the mainland’s agents have been growing since October, when four of the men disappeared. One of them was Gui Minhai, the owner of Mighty Current, a publishing house which controls the shop. Mr Gui, a Swedish citizen of Chinese birth, went missing while staying in Thailand. Three members of the shop’s staff—Lam Wing-kei, Lui Bo and Cheung Jiping—disappeared during visits to China’s mainland.
Ominous clues
But it was the disappearance of Lee Bo, a shareholder in the shop, that aroused the biggest concern because it occurred in Hong Kong itself ...
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