MARCH 25, 2016
Lee Bo, center, speaking with reporters near his home in Hong Kong on Friday. Mr. Lee was one of five people associated with Mighty Current Media to have disappeared, only to emerge in mainland China, apparently in detention. Credit Chun Ping On/Associated Press
HONG KONG — The appearance of a missing Hong Kong bookseller who returned on Thursday from mainland China has done little to quell public doubts about his case. One day after he spoke to the police and immigration officers in Hong Kong, local news media reported that the bookseller, Lee Bo, had returned to mainland China.
Mr. Lee’s murky case has stirred worries in Hong Kong about threats to press freedom and the rule of law. He and four other people connected with Mighty Current Media, a publisher of purported tell-alls about China’s leaders, disappeared in recent months, only to emerge in apparent police custody in mainland China.
Much of Mighty Current’s work was critical of the Chinese authorities, but upon his return to Hong Kong, Mr. Lee gave an interview to a Chinese broadcaster that praised the government.
“I feel the mainland has prospered and the motherland is affluent and powerful,” he told Phoenix Television. “As a Chinese, I feel proud. I plan to take my son back to the mainland for medical treatment later. My feeling is, as a Hongkonger, if Hong Kong wants development, it must closely rely on the mainland, the motherland.”
Mr. Lee added that he no longer planned to be involved in the publishing business.
“These cock-and-bull books, I won’t publish or sell them anymore,” he said. “As I said before, freedom of the press and speech don’t include reckless invention. Hong Kong still has people who do that, but I hope they’ll stop.”
When Mr. Lee disappeared from Hong Kong in late December, many people feared that security officers from mainland China had taken him across the internal border with Guangdong Province. Such a move would violate the “one country, two systems” arrangement that has governed the return of Hong Kong, a former British colony, to China since 1997.
Mr. Lee is a British citizen, and Britain has criticized his case as a breach of China’s commitment to maintaining Hong Kong’s autonomy. In an earlier interview with Phoenix Television, Mr. Lee said he wished to surrender his British “right of abode,” because it had complicated his situation.
The Hong Kong police said Mr. Lee had told them that he went to mainland China in December “by his own means voluntarily” and was not abducted. He declined to specify how he had crossed the border, and the Hong Kong police indicated that they were investigating him for possible immigration violations.
The police statement said Mr. Lee had told them that he went to the mainland “to assist in an investigation of a case relating to a person surnamed Gui.” Gui Minhai, a writer for and co-owner of Mighty Current Media, disappeared from his apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, and re-emerged on Chinese state television confessing to having violated parole after he was convicted of killing a woman while driving drunk in 2003.
Mr. Lee told Phoenix that he might make several return trips to the mainland to continue to help the investigation.
And on Friday, a day after returning to Hong Kong, he apparently returned. Journalists followed him as he left his home in the North Point neighborhood and was taken by a passenger van driven by unidentified men to a crossing point at the border with Guangdong Province.
