JAN 4 2016, 11:55 AM ET

Five Hong Kong Booksellers Critical of China Disappear

by ALEXANDER SMITH

Five booksellers specializing in literature critical of China have disappeared in recent months, raising fears that officials on the mainland were tightening their grip on the semi-autonomous territory.

The latest, 65-year-old Lee Bo, vanished on Wednesday, the BBC reported.

Lee's wife Sophie Choi said her husband had since called her from Shenzhen, just over the border in mainland China, and told her he was "helping with an investigation," according to the BBC.

Lee was a shareholder in Causeway Bay Books, whose tabloid paperbacks are highly critical of the Chinese leadership, Reuters reported. Four other people associated with Mighty Current and its Causeway Bay Books have also vanished, according to The Associated Press.

Lee's return permit, which Hong Kong residents need to enter China, was still at home, his wife said. This led at least one lawmaker, Albert Ho, and other analysts to speculate he had been taken by Chinese security agents.

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After mysterious disappearance, Hong Kong publisher claims he is in China ‘cooperating with authorities’

By Simon Denyer January 4 at 5:25 AM

The Hong Kong publisher whose disappearance has caused a major rift between Hong Kong and Beijing has written to a colleague to say that he is in China, where he is "cooperating with the authorities with an investigation."

Lee Bo, whose publishing company specializes in books critical of Beijing’s Communist Party leaders, vanished Wednesday in what lawmakers and experts say looks increasingly like an illegal abduction by Chinese police. He is the fifth member of the Mighty Current publishing house to vanish, amid reports that it was planning a gossipy book about the love life of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In a fax to a colleague at Causeway Bay Books, a subsidiary of Mighty Current, Lee claimed to have traveled to China "by my own means, to cooperate with an investigation carried out by relevant department," calling his situation "good" and "normal." But the handwritten fax, published by Taiwan's Central News Agency, raised as many questions as it answered, because Hong Kong police have said that they have no record of Lee passing through immigration, and his wife has said that he was not carrying any travel documents with him when he vanished.

In China, "assisting the authorities with an investigation" frequently equates to detention, suspicion of criminal activity and, sometimes, even torture. With the case garnering considerable international attention, the suspicion remains that Chinese police abducted Lee and that Chinese authorities pressured him into sending the fax in an attempt to calm the situation. On Monday, his wife, Sophie Choi, went to Hong Kong police to withdraw her earlier complaint, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.

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