It takes courage to be a bookseller in Hong Kong

LAM Wing-kee. Lam Wing-kee. Lam Wing-kee. Remember that name. That is a name that should go down in history - Hong Kong's history and China's history as well.

For Lam Wing-kee, a 61-year-old bookseller who vanished last October, returned to Hong Kong last week from mainland China and refused to obey Chinese orders to take to the mainland a hard disk from Causeway Bay Books, where he was manager, with information on customers who bought banned books.

Instead, he held an explosive press conference, where he disclosed that after crossing into Shenzhen on Oct 24 to visit his girlfriend, he was detained, his papers confiscated.The next day, blindfolded and handcuffed, he was put on a train for a 13-hour ride to Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, where he was kept in a small cell and watched day and night - to the extent that he could not brush his teeth in peace because the guards attached a string to the toothbrush and held on to the other end because they were afraid he might swallow the toothbrush in an attempt to kill himself.