Over the past few months, five people linked to the controversial Hong Kong bookseller Causeway Bay Books have vanished.BOBBY YIP/Reuters
In the annals of guilt-ridden warnings left unissued, none is more haunting than the one from pastor Martin Niemoller, who – in his "First they came for the socialists" poem – famously forewarned the ease with which it is possible to be ignorant of milestones that seem grimly foreboding only in retrospect.
In Hong Kong, those sorts of milestones seem to be piling up.
China has not exactly been one to round up socialists, or even Jews, who fled by the tens of thousands to old Shanghai after persecution in Europe. But it has long had no compunction about sending its public security goons to arrest, detain or disappear journalists, writers and other dissidents on the mainland.
But now, in a startling and ongoing development, Beijing appears to be ordering the kidnapping of muckraking publishers and bookstore employees in Hong Kong, a city that is guaranteed a separate legal and judicial system from the mainland under the terms of the former colony's handover from Britain to China.
The story is complex, and still unfolding – and it is not yet entirely clear whether, or in which ways, China has a role. But the details, so far, point in one relatively clear direction: that Beijing is violating its assurances to Britain and the people of Hong Kong in order to harass and intimidate the media in a global city with close ties to Canada, in a provocation that should not go uncontested.
Over the past few months, five people linked to the controversial Hong Kong bookseller Causeway Bay Books have vanished – from Gui Minhai, the owner of the publishing house that owns the bookstore, to regular employees going about their daily tasks. The store stocks highly critical, gossipy books about Chinese leaders (and, occasionally, their mistresses) that are banned on the mainland, making them popular with Chinese visitors to Hong Kong who can't easily indulge their appetite for such books in Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen.
The latest person to disappear, this past week, was Lee Bo, 65, a major shareholder of the bookstore.
Protesters amassed outside Beijing's local liaison office in the city and Hong Kong's pro-democracy politicians held a critical press conference on the issue. "We have strong reason to believe Mr. Lee was kidnapped and smuggled back to the mainland for political investigation," Democratic Party lawmaker Albert Ho said.
Mr. Lee reportedly called his wife from Shenzhen and said he was helping with an investigation there, and had apparently gone voluntarily. But the man's travel document authorizing re-entry to China was reportedly left at home, indicating that he probably did not travel from Hong Kong to China by the usual means.
To make matters more global, both Mr. Lee and Mr. Gui, who disappeared in October while on vacation in Thailand, are dual citizens: Mr. Lee also holds a British passport and Mr. Gui, though born in China, is a Swedish national.
How exactly would Canada react in a similar situation? Because let's not forget that Canada has at least 300,000 passport holders and dual citizens living in Hong Kong, largely a result of Hong Kongers who came to Vancouver ahead of the handover, nervous about what might happen. Many returned. But how long before one of them falls afoul of Beijing's ever-vague line in the sand? How long before Hong Kong's distinguishing rule of law and contractual obligations begin to be subsumed by China's system of unwritten rules and unspoken taboos, violations of which can get you thrown in jail.
Eric Chu, campaigning for the presidency in Taiwan, where many worry about their island's own relationship with China, has justifiably demanded statements from both Hong Kong and Beijing on who is responsible for the disappearances.
This vindictive new development in China-Hong Kong relations follows the tense pro-democracy demonstrations of two years ago, in which students and others took the streets to protest against a clampdown on the rules surrounding the upcoming 2017 elections – and some wondered whether we would see a Tiananmen round two.
It also takes place during the rule in China of Xi Jinping, a man who does not exactly handle criticism or dissent well. Mr. Xi was apparently the focus of one of the bookstore's salacious new titles, which delved into his past (and apparently his mistresses). That makes the whole thing more ominous.
Hong Kong, more broadly, is struggling to maintain its unique identity in Asia with Shanghai rising as a newer – and more volatile – centre of Asian finance, and as a much larger China attempts not so much to swallow the former colony whole, but to render it so similar to the mainland that it will conform in others' imaginations to how Hong Kong already appears in the minds of Beijing's leaders: that is, an unalienable, and relatively indistinguishable, part of the People's Republic.
And that is unfortunate. China's leaders seem to be trying to replicate in Hong Kong a situation that already, and deleteriously, pervades on the mainland: the wholesale degradation and destruction of the democratic means by which people can debate and contest those sorts of grim milestones, those sorts of negative developments, which often herald a disastrously wrong direction for society.