June 17, 2016
HONG KONG — One of the five Hong Kong booksellers whose disappearance last year drew international attention told a packed news conference on Thursday that he spent months in Chinese custody.
The bookseller, Lam Wing-kee, described his abduction at the border with mainland China in October, his months in solitary custody and his eventual forced confession.
“I couldn’t hire a lawyer,” Mr. Lam said. “I couldn’t call my family. I could only look up to the sky, all alone.”
Mr. Lam is the only one of the booksellers to speak out about his disappearance. When some of the others returned to Hong Kong several months ago, they refused to discuss any details; one said he had gone to the mainland voluntarily.
The Hong Kong booksellers offered rumor-filled and salacious books focused on the sex lives and power games of China’s top leaders, including the president, Xi Jinping. The books are banned in mainland China, where the message about politics and politicians is tightly controlled.
But publishers in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system from mainland China, have turned the illicit titles into a lucrative business.
The booksellers’ disappearance shocked people in Hong Kong and reverberated internationally. Many saw the development as an expansion of China’s authoritarian legal system beyond its borders, in clear violation of the “one country, two systems” framework that allows Hong Kong to maintain a high degree of autonomy from Beijing.
Thousands of people in this city took up their cause, marching to demand their release. Diplomats from Britain, the European Union, the United States and elsewhere also registered concern.
Mr. Lam, who returned to the city this week, spoke of being stopped by Chinese security personnel as he passed from Hong Kong to Shenzhen on Oct. 24. He said he was blindfolded, put on a train and sent hundreds of miles north to the city of Ningbo, where he was kept in a room alone for five months.
He described being locked up in a dingy room in Ningbo under 24-hour surveillance. He was given a script and directed to make a confession that incriminated Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong publisher, by saying that he was behind the unlawful sale of books that had caused harm to society.
“The room had padded furniture,” Mr. Lam said. “It’s obvious that it was for fear that you would commit suicide. They wanted to lock you up until you go mad.”
He added: “A nylon string was attached to one end of the toothbrush, and an officer held the other end of the string while you brushed, because they fear you’ll kill yourself. It was mental torture.”
The other four booksellers who disappeared included two colleagues from Mr. Lam’s bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, and its sister publishing company, Mighty Current. Both were detained last October while in mainland China.
Mr. Gui, the principal publisher of Mighty Current, was taken from his seaside apartment in Thailand in October. A second publisher, Lee Bo, disappeared off the streets of Hong Kong in late December.
Mr. Gui holds Swedish citizenship, while Mr. Lee has a British passport and Mr. Lam is a native of Hong Kong.
On Thursday, Mr. Lam told reporters that Mr. Lee had told him in private that he, too, was taken to China against his will. Mr. Lam said Mr. Lee was able to get him the equivalent of about $15,000, for living expenses and as compensation for the loss of his job after the bookstore was closed.
Mr. Lee did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Lam’s remarks.
In January, Mr. Gui made a tearful televised confession about his involvement in a fatal 2003 hit-and-run car accident in Ningbo. Mr. Gui is the only one of the five booksellers still in mainland detention. As the main force behind the publishing company and bookstore, he was responsible for a prodigious number of books, including several that made detailed allegations about Mr. Xi’s sex life.
Amnesty International said that Mr. Lam’s comments helped shed light on China’s hard-line legal system.
“Lam Wing-kee has blown apart the Chinese authorities’ story,” Mabel Au, Amnesty International’s director in Hong Kong, said in a statement. “He has exposed what many have suspected all along: that this was a concerted operation by the Chinese authorities to go after the booksellers.”
When Mr. Lam was released this week, it was from more comfortable quarters in neighboring Guangdong Province. He was moved there after Ningbo, he said, and was released on the condition that he retrieve a computer hard drive that had records of the bookstore’s customers.
Mr. Lam said now that he was out of the hands of the Chinese police he would not comply.
“I don’t plan on setting foot in mainland China ever again,” Mr. Lam said. “If we don’t speak up, Hong Kong will not be saved.”
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