China detains Hong Kong booksellers

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Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hello and welcome to Witness History with me Josephine McDermott. We take you back to a moment in history by speaking to the people who were there. Episodes are just nine minutes long and they come out every weekday, so if that sounds

like something you'd like to listen to, why not subscribe and turn your push notifications on. Now, it's ten years since a Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-Key, who was detained for selling material critical of the political elite, evaded the Chinese government.

It's the 21st of June 2016. A slim 61-year-old Cantonese man in a pale blue shirt open at the neck with thick, bullet-gray hair and thin, silver-rimmed glasses lights up a cigarette. He doesn't know if he's being watched.

He's been released from detention where he's been interrogated on the Chinese mainland by people calling themselves the Central Special Unit. He's been allowed back to Hong Kong to retrieve a hard drive the Special Unit wants for its investigations.

But now he's home, he has to decide. Will he comply? I realised this isn't an ordinary matter. It wasn't just about me now.

It was a problem for all Hong Kong people. I thought, why should I hand this data over to you? You want me to betray all these people? I can't do that.

I took three puffs of my cigarette before thinking about this again. What he would decide to do took incredible courage. We'll get to that later.

How did Lan Wyn Kee come to be in this situation? He opened Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong in 1994, an independent bookshop which you reached via stairs from street level. You could also buy books through mail order.

He says it was the Tiananmen Square Massacre that made him want to sell political books. What influenced me most was the June 4th incident in 1989 in China. I wondered why the June 4th incident didn't happen in the US, the UK, France or Canada, but in China. The Chinese military opened fire and massacred students.

Opening a bookstore was very important for two reasons. reasons. First, I could access different books to analyse and judge this event. Second, I could discuss this situation with other friends. What were the reasons? Is it possible that understanding the June 4th incident could change China in the future? This was actually the most

important reason for me in opening the bookstore. Back then, Britain was in control. You could read, sell and write any book. So at that time there was freedom of expression. They used democratic methods to govern Hong Kong. When the Communist Party came to power, everything was different. They wanted to control everything.

When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, a principle of one country, two systems was agreed whereby Hong Kong would keep a high degree of autonomy. This preserved the freedoms it was used to. In 2003 when individual visitors from mainland China were allowed to visit without needing to be on business or in a tour group for the first time, they found a prized commodity was on

offer. Hong Kong became a very important consumer hub for books. It was because books were unavailable in mainland China even if you had the money. So many business people weren't buying watches or mobile phones. They already had those. They came to Hong Kong to buy books. Lan Wenqi visited the city of Shenzhen two or three times a week to see his girlfriend.

It borders Hong Kong, but it's part of the Chinese mainland. At the border crossing on the 24th of October 2015, things went differently. When you go through customs, there are two checkpoints. The first one opens when you scan your ID and you go in. After you go in, it closes again. And the first one doesn't

reopen. I was standing in the middle. It started to continuously beep. Then two people came over. One was an official from Shenzhen followed by the highest ranking official at the Shenzhen immigration there. He told me to come out and go to a corner on the left. 31 people surrounded me. He was taken handcuffed and blindfolded by train to the eastern

Chinese city of Ningbo where he was kept in a small room. There was a bed, a place to sleep, a table, a chair, a bathroom, a screen, a A very tall window. They sense people 24 hours a day.

They talk shifts. Even two people watched you when you sleep. When you sleep, they make you stick your hands out. They force you to do that.

Do you know why you can't tuck your hands inside? They're afraid you'll kill yourself. They would interrogate me whenever they felt they needed to. At first, it was about three or four days a week.

The worst part was when I found out that my computer had been opened exposing data. They showed me the emails I'd sent books to. It showed what books were ordered, when they were sent, how many copies, the last names, first names, and the destination addresses.

This kind of thing definitely shouldn't be made public, right? Because I helped send people books. I kept their data confidential. I was terrified when they showed it to me.