• Muad'DibberMA
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    35 years ago

    Okay, so even just reading the wikipedia article you can tell something stinks about how that’s being portrayed. This story is 3 years old now, and it looks like they’ve all reappeared, or been interviewed within the last year or so. It seems some of them were Chinese citizens that were using HK as a sanctuary to avoid criminal punishment.

    Yiu was arrested by police in Shenzhen on charges of falsely labelling and smuggling industrial chemicals worth $220,000 in 2010 and was sentenced to prison for 10 years allegedly for smuggling, even though the real reason for the trumped up charges, in the eyes of many, was China’s increasing restrictions on political expression under Xi.

    Sounds pretty serious to me.

    On 29 February 2016, Lee Bo met with Hong Kong police and then gave a televised interview on the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television in an undisclosed location in mainland China, in what was his first public appearance since he went missing. He held to the story that was in the letters published by Sing Tao, saying he “resorted to illegal immigration” to get to the mainland “to cooperate in a judicial investigation” as he did not want to draw attention to his visit. He denied that he was kidnapped, but did not give details as to how he actually entered Mainland China without his travel documents. Adding that his British citizenship had been sensationalised, Lee Bo says that he will abandon his right of abode in the United Kingdom.[117][118]

    On 24 March, Lee Bo returned to Hong Kong and asked the authorities to drop the case like his three colleagues did before. He said he would never again sell banned books, and was transported back into the mainland in a vehicle with cross-border licence plates the next day.[119][120]

    Seems like this one got solved on its own some years later.

    Around the time of the disappearances, Gui Minhai was rumoured to have been working on a book regarding current CPC general secretary Xi Jinping’s personal history, tentatively named Xi and His Six Women (習近平和他的六個女人). The project was suggested to be linked to the disappearances.

    This Glenn Beck guy looks like he resurfaced in 2018.

    • @vendemiaire
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      5 years ago

      Saying you immigrated illegally on purpose to go to a judicial investigation? Renouncing your citizenship to another country for totally random reasons? Yep, seems all fine and dandy to me!

      Also, does the entire idea of “banned books” not strike you as a little, you know, authoritarian?

      • @TheIenzo
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        05 years ago

        This exactly. It makes me so confused when leftists would defend something like book bans.