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 He could return across the mainland China border to meet up
with the Chinese agents who had just kept him captive for eight
months and hand them a disk holding the names of hundreds of
customers who had ordered politically sensitive books.
The alternative was to hold a news conference in Hong Kong and
tell the world how he had been arrested, blindfolded and
handcuffed in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen on Oct. 22,
and then taken to the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo where he
was forced into solitary confinement and faced repeated
interrogations.
Lam chose the latter.
By doing so, he reignited a controversy that first rocked Hong
Kong, the former British colony that returned to China in 1997,
late last year. That was when Lam and four other booksellers,
who published gossipy and often scandalous books on the personal
lives and power struggles of China's senior Communist Party
leaders, had mysteriously disappeared.
Just a year earlier Lam had led an ordinary life, managing a
small bookshop, but he now found himself thrust into the center
of an extraordinary political storm that had called into
question Hong Kong's relationship with its Chinese rulers.
In an interview with Reuters, Lam said he was released last
Tuesday and sent back to Hong Kong with an express purpose - to
bring back that hard disk containing the customer database.
But as he prepared to board a train to the Chinese border, Lam
vacillated. He paused at a 7-11 convenience store where he
bought a bottle of water and a packet of cigarettes that he
smoked, one after another.
"I could have changed trains and gone directly to Lowu to give
them the hard disk," he told Reuters, referring to the Chinese
district bordering Hong Kong. "Once I crossed the border I'd
have no chance. But I could still decide whether to go public."
He chose to board a train back to the city and called the
pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho, who helped arrange a press
conference that same evening.
"At the most intense moment of indecision, the pressure was
great, but in the end I figured this wasn't an issue only for
myself or for the five of us ... so I decided to come out," Lam
said.
STILL DETAINED
Four of the booksellers have now returned to Hong Kong,
including Lam and Chinese-born British national Lee Bo, who went
missing from Hong Kong in late December. But Swedish passport
holder Gui Minhai, who disappeared from the Thai resort of
Pattaya last October, remains in detention in China.
Chinese authorities have repeatedly said they would never do
anything illegal and that Hong Kong's autonomy was fully
respected.
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Beijing's representative office in Hong Kong declined to comment on
Lam's account of his detention.
Lam's recounting of repeated interrogations by Chinese agents,
detention for months alone in a small room without contact with
family or lawyers, does not mesh with statements by some of the
other booksellers who said they had been well treated by
authorities.
Also Lam said that Lee had been abducted by Chinese agents in Hong
Kong, but Lee has disputed this account, saying he went to China
voluntarily with unspecified friends.
A number of Western governments, including Britain, voiced concerns
this year that Lee had been abducted, undermining the city's "one
country, two systems" formula of governance granting Hong Kong a
high degree of autonomy under Chinese rule.
Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying, speaking on Monday after he
returned from holiday, said he would write a letter to Beijing to
express concern over the bookseller case.
"Any law-enforcement entity, including mainland and foreign, does
not have the right to exercise power in Hong Kong," said Leung. "It
is illegal for any overseas entities to enforce law in Hong Kong and
we shall not accept it."
NO UNIFORMS
Lam told Reuters he believed his bookstore, where he worked as the
shop manager had come into the crosshairs of unspecified senior
Chinese leaders given some of the controversial publications that
they put out through the years.
"Some books were affecting the leaders," Lam said. "They discovered
some information channels were real and they tried investigating
these channels, to find out the source. I think they blew the whole
thing up for this reason alone."
Lam worked for years as the face of the Causeway Bay Bookshop, a
hole in the wall independent bookshop tucked upstairs in an old
building behind the well-known SOGO Japanese department store in the
teeming Hong Kong shopping hotspot.
Lam said that it was rare for any of the 50 or 60 officers who dealt
with him during his imprisonment to mention politics or give away
any personal details. He said none wore uniforms nor showed him
identification papers.
(Reporting By James Pomfret; additional reporting by Sharon Shi,
Tris Pan and Lindsy Long; Editing by Martin Howell)
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