Student activist Agnes Chow of Scholarism posted a video on Facebook on Saturday night, discussing the latest employee to have gone missing from an anti-Beijing bookshop in Hong Kong.
Lee Bo, the employee at the Hong Kong-based publisher Mighty Current went missing on Wednesday night. The bookstore publishes titles critical of the Beijing government and Lee is the fifth employee who went missing.
In the five-minute video “An Urgent Cry from Hong Kong,” Chow explains the purpose of the video is to raise global awareness and spread word of the missing employee, who she claimed to have been “abducted to Mainland.” She said in English that Lee was out of contact when he went to collect books from a warehouse, and his wife later received a call from Lee, who unusually spoke in Mandarin rather than Cantonese.
Calling the event a “white terror incident,” Chow said citizens who sell politically sensitive books should not be suppressed by threats of “disappearance” and imprisonment. She said the abduction was suspected to be done by the police in China and if this speculation is true, it indicates the erosion of the one country, two systems in the Basic Law of Hong Kong.
“We feel that Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore, it is named as Hong Kong only. The most worrying thing finally happened, ” she said. “Even I am also afraid of my personal safety after this incident happened, I still believe we should continuously fight for freedom from fear because it is an important core value that we should uphold.”
Chow added that she filmed the video in Japan without much preparation. “I just think that this time, international attention is very important,” she said.
