A second of five Hong Kong booksellers detained on the Chinese mainland has returned home, according to police.
Cheung Chi-ping, who went missing in October after a trip to visit relatives in Shenzhen, was released just two days after his boss Lui Por, a general manager at the Mighty Current publishing house, was also allowed to return to Hong Kong.
In both cases the Hong Kong police released a statement confirming the men were home. According to the police both men said they did not need further assistance from the government or the police force.
Mighty Currents prints titles highly critical of the Communist party and the Chinese government, and, in the weekend before the men started to disappear, had been printing volumes that attacked Chinese president Xi Jinping’s private life.
Gui Minhai and Lee Bo, the owners and managers of the publishing house and its attached bookshop, Causeway Bay Bookstore, and another employee Lam Wing-kee, remain missing.
Gui, a Swedish national, disappeared in October after a holiday in Thailand. He reappeared in January in a tearful televised “confession” in which he said he had voluntarily returned to China out of remorse over a hit-and-run in 2004.
Lee Bo, a British national feared to have been kidnapped on Hong Kong soil, has also appeared in a televised interview where he said he had returned to China “of his own accord” in order to help with “an investigation”, and that he was renouncing his British citizenship. He reportedly met with Hong Kong police last week in an undisclosed location and told them he did not need any help.
The three clerks of the Mighty Current publishing house and Causeway Bay Bookstore had also appeared on a televised interview, where they said they had been detained for “illegal book trading” in the mainland, supposedly admitting to having delivered about 4000 books to China since 2014 without a licence.
Bao Pu, an independent publisher in Hong Kong, said he believed with this gesture “the Chinese authorities want to minimise the impact of the bookstore event, and sweep everything under the carpet as quickly as they possibly can”.
