Chain smoking outside a train station in Hong Kong last Thursday, a thin, bespectacled man called Lam Wing-kee was in a bind.
He could return across the mainland China border to meet up with the Chinese agents who had just kept him captive for eight months and hand them a disk holding the names of hundreds of customers who had ordered politically sensitive books.
The alternative was to hold a news conference in Hong Kong and tell the world how he had been arrested, blindfolded and handcuffed in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen on Oct. 22, and then taken to the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo where he was forced into solitary confinement and faced repeated interrogations.