Cartoon by South China Morning Post’s veteran political cartoonist Harry Harrison, January 2016.
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Mr Lee, who along with his wife, is a shareholder in the bookstore and the publishing house that owns it, took charge of briefing journalists, dealing with advocacy groups and speaking with law enforcement officials.
Mr Ho, a customer at the firm’s bookshop in Causeway Bay, said he had heard from other store regulars that the publisher was going to launch a book about President Xi Jinping’s ex-girlfriend.
The statement from the Foreign Office did not specify which of the missing men was British, but it is believed to be Lee Bo, 65, the latest bookseller to go missing.
“We are highly concerned with this case”, said Beijing-backed Hong Kong leader Leung.
Those details, plus an unconfirmed police report showing no record of Mr Lee ever having left Hong Kong, were enough to convince veteran lawmaker and human rights activist Albert Ho that the bookseller had been kidnapped.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, on a visit to Beijing, said he pressed officials for information on Lee.
“Only legal enforcement agencies in Hong Kong have the legal authority to enforce laws in Hong Kong”, Leung said.
Several trenchant editorials by China’s state media fuelled public concern in Hong Kong that China might be tightening its grip on the city. Authorities from Britain and Sweden are investigating the disappearance of the bookseller’s colleagues, and more than a million people have viewed a video by a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong begging for global help has been viewed almost 900,000 times on Facebook.
“If mainland authorities are allowed to enforce laws in Hong Kong, it spells the death knell for ‘One Country, Two Systems, ‘” she said in a telephone interview.
The top-level intervention came as Lee’s wife, Sophie Choi Ka-ping said a letter she received from her husband which prompted her to withdraw a missing person report she made to Hong Kong police last week, was authentic, insisting it was in his handwriting and he hadn’t been forced to write it.
“Based on the basic law of Hong Kong and China’s nationality law, this person in question is first and foremost a Chinese citizen”, he said. However, the BBC’s Chinese service has reported that the individual referred to is in fact Lee Bo. “Liaison of the Central People’s Government of Hong Kong explain!”
The company’s co-owner, Gui Minhai, is also among those missing, the other three being staff members. But, under the Hong Kong law only the subject of a missing person report can cancel it.
She had said his return permit, which Hong Kong citizens must show to enter China, was still at home – seen by some as evidence he may have been abducted by security agents. But Chan said chief executive Leung should be taking the matter up at the highest level in Beijing.
He also said: “I am very well”.
When contacted by phone last Thursday, his wife, herself a writer, told me she had been unable to reach him on his mobile phone. “In recent times, we have been so scared, we don’t dare to go to the mainland”, Ms Choi told local news website Initium Media earlier.
Ho said that the publishing house had been planning on publishing a book about the “love affairs” of China’s President Xi Jinping during his time working “in the provinces”. He disappeared last week and was last seen in Hong Kong.
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Four other associates of the publisher that specializes in selling and publishing gossipy political books on China’s Communist Party leaders have been unaccounted for since late a year ago. The source, identified only by the name Lee, said he believed that Chinese authorities had detained the men.
