If you were going to pick a poster boy for the concerns over the autonomy of Hong Kong, billionaire businessman Xiao Jianhua would not be a leading candidate. But, as Amnesty International researcher William Nee says, ?Quite simply, human rights pertains to everybody.? In late January, financier Xiao disappeared from his luxury apartment at the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong and has not been seen since.
Shortly after, reports appeared in the international press that Xiao had been abducted by Chinese agents and taken to a secret location on the mainland. These accounts read like spy fiction, detailing that Xiao had been spirited away in a wheelchair while his all-female team of bodyguards looked on. Hong Kong police say they are looking into Xiao?s whereabouts even though his wife has asked them to drop the case. Nee told me that Xiao?s family members in China may have been pressured by the authorities not to speak publicly.
For human rights activists, Xiao?s uncertain fate echoes that of five Causeway Bay booksellers who were selling politically sensitive material. Their disappearance in 2015 sparked a scandal in Hong Kong and fears that the mainland authorities were eroding freedoms guaranteed by the British government after the 1997 handover. One of them later reappeared and claimed to have been abducted by the Chinese security forces, detained for eight months and forced make false confessions.
