The Daily - Hong Kong's Missing Bookseller

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

When the owner of a thriving bookstore in Hong Kong disappeared in October 2015, questions swirled. What happened? And what did the Chinese government have to do with it? Guest: Alex W. Palmer, a Beijing-based writer who has reported on China for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, when the owner of a Hong Kong bookstore went missing, questions swirled. What had happened? And what did the Chinese government of Xi Jinping have to do with it? It's Tuesday, April 24th.

In downtown Hong Kong, there's an area called Causeway Bay. And if you walk down one of those streets, you'll find find tucked in between an upscale lingerie store and a pharmacy. There's this grimy little staircase and there's signs all over pointing you upstairs for beauty parlors and apartment buildings. But if you stop on the second floor landing, you're going to find a tiny little store called Causeway Bay Books. And inside, there's just a few shelves, a couple tables stacked high with books.

And the owner of this bookstore is a man named Lam Wing Key. He's got a poof of gray hair, tiny little glasses, a nervous energy about him. He's always smoking a cigarette. And one day, he just stopped showing up to work. And one day, he just stopped showing up to work. Alex Palmer has been reporting on what happened to Lamb Winky. Well, it turned out that Lamb Winky wasn't the only one.

He disappeared at the end of October in 2015. And within a couple of months, people started noticing a curious trend that other people connected to Causeway Bay Books and to the publisher that owned his store, they were also disappearing. This street in Hong Kong is now at the center of a growing mystery. A bookseller in Hong Kong went missing. Three Hong Kong booksellers who went missing are in China. Li Bo is the fifth person from the same book publishing company to go missing. Disappeared since October. Since October, five men have disappeared. The assumption was that Chinese authorities were involved somehow

because the thing about Causeway Bay Books and about Lam Wing Ki and the men connected to them is that they weren't just ordinary booksellers. They were selling a very special commodity in Hong Kong, something known as banned books, which often talked about Chinese officials in ways that inside China you could never get away with. This is Hong Kong's rowdy, unruly, raucous free press. There's works that touch on the darkest secrets of communist China, The Greatest Sins of the Party. But then you also have another side, which is what Lam Wing Kee and his bookstore were more famous for, which are tawdrier. So you have pulpy grocery store novels about the sex lives of high-ranking communist officials and their tawdry affairs and the corruption, the backstabbing in the party. Basically, Hong Kong's books show that the perfect stayed image

put forward by the Communist Party might not be quite as true as the Chinese government would like its citizens to think. What does a ban on books in mainland China mean for a bookseller like Lam who's in Hong Kong? It means a couple of things. It means, first of all, that a lot of the customers who he sees in his bookstore every day are people from the mainland coming to Hong Kong for vacation. Since it was handed over to China in 1997 from being a British colony,

it's been guaranteed a measure of freedom that the rest of China has never been able to enjoy. So Hong Kong has freedom of speech, freedom of the press, other freedoms that only it enjoys within China. So Chinese tourists come there to get a taste of that kind of freedom. They go to these banned bookstores, which offer them insights into their own country that they can't get when they're inside of China. into their own country that they can't get when they're inside of China. But Lam did something that other booksellers weren't willing to do. He would ship books en masse to his customers in mainland China.

So that way they didn't have to come to him, he didn't have to go to them, but he could still get his product out there. And he developed his own methodology, his own tricks for doing this. So he knew to only ship to the busiest ports where these works were less likely to be caught in the huge flow of goods coming into China. He would slip false dust covers onto his book. So if an official just takes a look at the packet, it looks like something perfectly acceptable within Chinese laws. But really, if you open the pages, it's exactly the stuff China doesn't want getting in. So he learned how to perfect the system. And he said that more than 90% of his books made it

through. Had Lam ever been caught for doing this? He had. He had been caught once in 2012. He was interrogated for six hours, given a warning, but by the end of that session, they were laughing like old friends, and he was let go without a problem. So he essentially talked his way out of trouble. Yes, and he'd always been able to do that. He knew how to talk to the officers. He knew how to play dumb.

He knew how to crack a joke, offer them one of those cigarettes he always had on hand. Lamb has a certain nervous but radiant energy, and he knows how to navigate situations like this. It's been his profession for years, and he's very, very good at it. But on October 24th, 2015, suddenly that failed him. Suddenly, that failed him. That day, Lam was going from Hong Kong into the mainland. And when he tried to pass the custom checkpoint, he was stopped. An alert went up when he put down his passport.

And a few officers started pointing towards him. Then a few officers started surrounding him. Then a gate in front of him swung open, and a whole group of officers came and rushed him into a corner. And Lam started asking, what's wrong? What's wrong? What have I done? What's happening? But no one would answer his questions. They shoved him into a room,

and he found himself sitting across from two officers. And one was a man surnamed Lee, who he recognized from his run-in in 2012 when he had talked his way out of the situation. And at one point, they were left alone. So it's just Lee and Lam. And Lam, trying to smooth over the situation, makes a joke. And Lee just explodes at him and says, how can you be joking about this? I'm part of a special investigative task force. We know what you're doing, and it's our job. We're going to shut down Hong Kong's illicit publishing scene once and for all. And Lam was stunned into silence.

That was the last thing Li said to him. After that meeting with Li and the other official at the customs checkpoint, Lam was put onto a train, blindfolded, handcuffed, with a hood over his head. And when he got off, he was driven for about 45 minutes and moved to a facility where he was put into a cell and told to go to sleep. So he's genuinely confused. He's doing what he always does, and suddenly he's whisked away and far from home with no idea exactly what his legal status is. That's right. He had been allowed to work as he pleased and to mostly get away with skirting these Chinese laws for a long time. So he wasn't sure. But there was one thing that was different. After a mysterious, secretive process,

China has chosen its new leaders, and foremost among them, the new Party General Secretary, as expected, Xi Jinping. At the end of 2012, Xi Jinping had become Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party. A few months later...

While it's official, China has a new president. In March of 2013, he became president of China. So as we're looking at this situation with Lam in 2015, this is right at the same time that Xi Jinping is consolidating power. Power in China began back in November when he became the president of the party, the head of the military, and now the head of state. He's ousting rivals. He's cracking down on corruption. President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign has purged the party of many of his real or perceived enemies and rivals. And bringing everyone to heel. More than 80,000 Communist Party members have been investigated so far.

Some have lost their jobs, others have been kicked out of the Communist Party. And no one, no matter how high ranking, appears safe from Xi's purge. He was taking down even the biggest names in the party, showing that nobody is above his control and that he was going to take down anything that threatened his rule. So whether that was corruption or whether that was information in these kinds of books

that he didn't want to see in the hands of ordinary Chinese, it turns out that Lam and Causeway Bay Books, they had just been about to publish a book called Xi Jinping and His Lovers, which perhaps writing about Xi Jinping himself touched a nerve like nothing had before. Once people realized that Lam had disappeared and his colleagues had disappeared, all under these mysterious circumstances, Hong Kong exploded in fury. We will defend our system.

We will defend our freedom. We will defend our freedom. There were protest marches of thousands of people holding Lam's picture, holding the pictures and names of his co-workers. Protesters carried signs reading Today Leave Woe, Tomorrow You and Me. And people feared

what would come next if they can take our books, if they can take our people, then what freedoms do we really have left? It makes me feel unsafe, helpless. If we do not speak out, then it's no longer Hong Kong. So this is evidence to the people

of Hong Kong that China is not honoring its commitment to Hong Kong's freedom. Exactly. But the people of Hong Kong will stand up to the Communist Party to say no! No! No! No! No!

No! No! And while all this is happening in Hong Kong, people protesting Lam's arrest and leaving notes for him at the store, what's actually happening to Lam? Lam doesn't know any of this, of what's happening back in Hong Kong. He has been restricted to his cell, interrogated every day, not given any contact with the outside world, any news, any information.

He was watched 24 hours a day by rotating teams of two men who wouldn't talk to him. No one would tell him how long he had been there, that he wasn't given access to any calendar, anything like that. But he devised a way to keep track of time. He pulled a thread off the clothes he had been given, and each day he would tie one knot into the thread to keep track of how long he'd been imprisoned. And one day, about three and a half months into his detention, he was put on a train without explanation. And he was moved to a sumptuous, sprawling villa called the Kylan Villa. And he walked into a room in the villa and he saw around a table his co-workers from Causeway Bay Books.

That must have surprised him. Yes. He didn't know what to expect. No one had told him anything. He hadn't known that the other co-workers had been taken. So they were all very cautious. They weren't sure what this was, if they were being set up, why they were being allowed to meet each other all of a sudden. But they sat down to this dinner. They were served course after course of vegetables and pork and tofu. And under the watch of security cameras and a guard, they tried to talk in whatever terms they could about their situation. And one of the employees, a man named

Lee Bo, who had been the co-owner of a publishing house that sold its books through Causeway Bay Books, he told the other men, just cooperate. This is going to be over soon. Let's just do what they say. And he also handed each of the men 100,000 Hong Kong dollars. And he said that this marked the dissolution of their company, that they were out of business and that they should put it all behind them. So it seems that in putting these men together in a room, Chinese officials thought that this would be a good way to end their company and make sure that everyone knew that if they just went along with what was happening, they'd be okay. Does this mean that all of these detained men,

including Lam, are now free? Not quite. So his interiors come back to him, and they say they've got a deal for him. He'll be allowed to return to Hong Kong if, once he gets there, he needs to go and get a computer from his former boss, the man at the dinner who had told everyone to cooperate, Li Bo,

and bring it back to Chinese officials on the mainland. And the reason they wanted this computer is because it contained information about customers, about authors. So this was going to be their ticket to figuring out exactly who had been buying the books and expanding the investigation onto the mainland. One more thing, he'd be allowed to return to Hong Kong permanently after that, but only if he kept working in this bookstore and served as a mole for the investigation. So he'd keep selling his books, he'd keep welcoming customers,

but every time somebody bought a banned book, he'd take their information down, he'd take photos, he'd keep records, and he would turn those over to officials on the mainland. So in real time, they'd be able to know who's buying what and where it's going. If he did that, they'd let him go. So what did Lam decide to do? He agreed instantly. He said that after being in detention for that long, after being interrogated like that,

he was ready to cooperate. He just wanted to go home. So anything he could do to get to Hong Kong, he was ready to do it. He was broken. So he formally agrees to this deal offered by, he was ready to do it. He was broken. So he formally agrees to this deal offered by the Chinese government. That's right. So then in June of 2016, they put him on a train and he heads back into Hong Kong for the first time since his capture about eight months earlier. And he goes to the police station. He tells them just as he had been instructed to do,

that he was fine, that he hadn't been taken, that they should drop any investigation into him. And then he followed the instructions again. Lam went to Li Bo's house, he got the computer, and after talking with Li Bo in private this time, Lam returns to his hotel room and he gets ready to go back to the mainland the next morning with the computer in hand to hand it over to Chinese officials. But he had been given a cell phone by his handler so that he could keep in touch with them. And they had strictly forbidden him from going on the internet or looking up any information. But sitting alone in his hotel room that night, he starts searching for his own name and he starts searching for

Causeway Bay books just to see what's happened in these months that he's been gone. And what he sees And this is his first opportunity, it sounds like, to do that? That's correct. Being on the mainland with censorship and with internet controls, he wouldn't have been able to find anything anyway. So sitting in that hotel room in Hong Kong, it's his first opportunity to see if anyone's even noticed that he's missing or what's happened to him and his colleagues, if that's resonated at all.

And he starts scrolling, and what he finds is... We believe that it's kept by the Chinese government and for some political reasons. So we think it's not legal in Hong Kong. So we fight for our law and freedom. Page after page of videos and articles, and he sees that 6,000 Hong Kongers had marched through the streets chanting his name, chanting the name of his bookstore and his colleagues, and calling for their freedom, calling for their release. This was the first real

indication of the reaction in Hong Kong to the disappearances. The mood was angry. He sees that this story has been picked up all over the world, that people are worried about Hong Kong. And he stays up all night just reading and watching. The next morning, he goes to the train station and he's getting ready to go back to the mainland. He has the computer with all the information in his backpack, and he's almost ready to board the train.

But he stops to smoke a cigarette, and he starts thinking. And then he smokes another cigarette, and he keeps thinking about what he's seen and what this means. And by the time he finished his third cigarette, he knew what he had to do. And he walked over to a payphone and he called a former customer of his, a Hong Kong legislator named Albert Ho. And he said, this is Lam Wing Kee. I'm the man who's missing. Can I come in and talk to you?

I need to tell people what's happened. And an hour later, Lam Wing Kee was in a room packed with reporters, packed with photographers, with video cameras, and it seemed that all of Hong Kong was waiting to hear what he had to say. What's incredible about this news conference is that Lam was the fourth of his co-workers and employees to return to Hong Kong. But the other three who had come back, they had been parroting the same line. They said, there was nothing wrong.

We were helping with an important investigation in mainland China. That's all I'm going to say. I can't talk. And Lam suddenly comes back and puts himself in front of the news cameras and lays out in extensive and painful detail his entire ordeal from the day he was captured until the day he found himself standing in front of those cameras narrating what had happened. So Lam Wun Kee ended up saying what everyone in Hong Kong had feared all along but hadn't been able to put

words to. It took him coming back and staging that press conference to really articulate what Hong Kong had feared all along. And what happens after Lam holds this extraordinary news conference? Well, pretty much everything he expected to happen, which is that his co-workers denounced him. They said he was lying. Anyone connected to him on the mainland said that he had been tricked, that this was all a ruse. Some of them were arrested, including his girlfriend on the mainland who denounced him and was briefly interrogated for her role in bringing these banned books over. So his own girlfriend publicly denounces him. That's right. His coworkers, his friends, his girlfriend, he was ostracized, so...

And presumably at the behest of the Chinese government. That's right. So even as he becomes something of a hero within Hong Kong for speaking up and for putting into words what people had always suspected, the personal cost was pretty immediate and pretty clear. And what about the bookstore, Causeway Bay Books?

What happened to that? And I guess to the larger industry of banned books in Hong Kong? In Lam's absence, the bookstore had been bought by a man surnamed Chan who immediately closed it. So the bookstore was shuttered. It's still there.

And if you peek inside, you can still see some of those dusty shelves and some books on tables. But it's been closed ever since he was taken. He's hoping that someday it'll come back. But if you look at the larger publishing industry and what's happened since Lamb Winky's disappearance and return, that seems unlikely because Lamb Winky's case was not isolated. It was actually just a harbinger of what was to come for the wider industry. The banned book industry is in freefall. People won't publish. People don't want to read it. People don't want to be associated with it because to them it's not worth the risk. Whatever space for dissent or contention used to exist before Xi Jinping,

it's closing, if not gone already, both within China and now it seems in territories connected to China or even with Chinese people overseas. Anyone who might be stirring up trouble, anyone who might be trying to crack that perfect image that the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping put forward about their rule, that person is seen as a threat. That information is seen as a threat. So anything inside China or out that tells a story that China doesn't want people to hear, that's no longer safe. Alex, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Lam Wing-Kee recently announced that he will be reopening his bookstore in Taiwan later this year. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, after a 34-hour manhunt involving 160 officers, police said they had arrested the man suspected of carrying out a mass shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville. The suspect, 29-year-old Travis Reinking, is accused of using an AR-15 rifle to kill four people at the restaurant on Sunday before a customer grabbed the gun away from him.

The main question we've been getting today is regarding confiscation of firearms. On August 24, 2017, Tazewell County deputies confiscated the firearm owner's identification card of Travis Rinking and pursuant to revocation by the Illinois State Police. At that time, Mr. Rinking voluntarily surrendered four firearms. Authorities are now trying to understand why Reinking, who has a history of erratic behavior, had a gun at all. behavior, had a gun at all. A year ago, police in Illinois, where Ryan King lived until recently, had seized his weapons, including the AR-15 used in Sunday's shooting, after he tried to cross a security barrier at the White House in an attempt to meet with President Trump. His father was present and had an FOID card,

a valid FOID card, and had the legal right to take custody of the weapons. So he was allowed to do that after he assured deputies that he would keep them secure and away from Travis. Police believe that Ryan King's father may have returned the guns to his son before the shooting. And a 25-year-old man deliberately drove a van onto a sidewalk in Toronto on Monday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 15 more.

All I've seen is this guy is just crumbling. I mean, he's going 70, 80 clicks. He's just hitting people one by one, going down. Oh, man, it was like, it was a nightmare, man. Moments after the van came to a stop, the driver, identified as Alec Manassian, was confronted by a police officer in an exchange caught on tape. Come on, get down!

Come on, get down! Get down! I've got my pocket. Come on, Manassian was arrested and taken into custody. Canadian officials said it did not appear to be an act of terrorism. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.