Lam Wing-kee, a bookseller in Hong Kong whose abduction and imprisonment by Chinese authorities, forced confession to selling forbidden books and subsequent public stand against his detention made him an international cause célèbre, died on July 2 in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. He was 70.
Mr. Lam’s death in a hospital, from lung cancer, was announced by the ministry of culture in Taiwan, where Mr. Lam had been living in exile since 2019.
For two decades, Mr. Lam’s celebrated Hong Kong storefront, Causeway Bay Bookstore, specialized in titles that visitors from mainland China craved but could never hope to obtain where they lived: cheaply produced, racy, often salacious accounts of the private lives of top Communist Party officials, including President Xi Jinping, as well as provocative critiques of mainland rule.
In late 2015, Mr. Lam was one of five booksellers kidnapped by Chinese officials, and he eventually spoke out, denouncing the five months he had spent in solitary confinement merely for selling books that authorities on the mainland wanted suppressed.
In all, he spent eight months in custody, released only after agreeing to provide authorities with information on customers and authors. Back in Hong Kong, though, Mr. Lam refused to cooperate.
His case came to be seen by fellow Hong Kong citizens as symbolic of the city’s fast-eroding liberties under Chinese rule. There were demonstrations during his detention, and thousands took to the streets again after his release in a show of support after he gave a surprise news conference in June 2016.
Chinese officials had expected him to return to the mainland, bearing a computer hard drive with customer names. Instead, he summoned Hong Kong reporters and described being kidnapped at a Chinese border crossing in October 2015, blindfolded and handcuffed, and kept in a 200-square-foot room under constant guard for months, to be charged with “illegal sales of books.”
The officials, he said, then scripted a “confession,” making him record it over and over until they were satisfied, and forced him to read it on state television in February 2016.
Four months later, defiant in front of journalists, Mr. Lam — “thin and wiry, with an unruly pouf of side-swept gray hair and a wisp of mustache,” as Alex W. Palmer later described him The New York Times Magazine — proclaimed his city’s independent spirit.
“I want to tell the whole world: Hong Kongers will not bow down to brute force,” Mr. Lam said.
In 2014, Mr. Lam had sold his bookstore to one of the most successful of the forbidden-book publishers, Mighty Current Media, and he remained as manager. It was three of Mighty Current’s employees and one of its owners, Gui Minhai, who were swept up along with Mr. Lam late the next year. Mr. Gui remains in custody in China.
For years before his abduction, Mr. Lam had made furtive trips to the mainland with his books, often using false covers and always managing to stay one step ahead of officials. Then, on Oct. 24, 2015, he was bringing books across the border at Shenzhen, the port city where his girlfriend also lived, when security officials snatched him.
The next months were a nightmare. He didn’t know where he was being held. He was repeatedly interrogated. He battled despair.
“You have a complete disconnection from the outside world,” he told Mr. Palmer of The Times Magazine in 2018. “You don’t know what will happen. They can do anything to you.”
Lam Wing-kee was born in Hong Kong on Dec. 16, 1955, and attended Heung To Middle School there. His parents had moved from the mainland to Hong Kong, then a British colony, about a decade earlier, during China’s civil war, according to Chan Kin-man, the president of the Taiwan Society for Hong Kong Studies, who knew Mr. Lam.
From 1985 to 1989, Mr. Lam worked in the book distribution department at the Chung Hwa Book Company, funded by the Chinese. After the Chinese government’s crackdown on pro-democracy student demonstrators in Beijing‘s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he moved to the dissident-supporting Greenfield Bookstore.
He founded Causeway Bay in 1994, and it remained a fixture for critics of the mainland, especially after the transfer of sovereignty to China from Britain in 1997.
It was only after his return to Hong Kong in June 2016 that Mr. Lam learned that thousands of his fellow citizens had marched during his captivity, demanding his release and that of the other seized booksellers. He also learned that Causeway Bay had been sold and shuttered.
In 2019, threatened by a new extradition law, Mr. Lam went into exile in Taiwan. In April of the following year, he reopened his store in Taipei. It soon became a gathering spot for exiled Hong Kongers; Mr. Lam slept on a bunk bed behind the cashier’s desk. To visiting journalists, he issued warnings that what happened to Hong Kong could happen to Taiwan, too.
After Mr. Lam’s death, Taiwan’s ministry of culture saluted the store as “an inspiration and role model for democracy, liberty and human rights across borders.”
His survivors include his two sons and his ex-wife, all of whom live in England. Huang Chun-sheng, the pastor handling Mr. Lam’s funeral in Taipei, declined to provide their names for security reasons.
The authorities continue to pursue Hong Kong’s booksellers. It was reported on Wednesday that two independent bookstores in Hong Kong, including Greenfield, had been raided, and five people had been arrested. This followed bookstore raids in March and June.
Well before his death, Mr. Lam vowed never to return to China. “Contemporary China,” he told The Times Magazine in 2018, “is an absurd country.”
Professor Chan, of the Taiwan Society for Hong Kong Studies, wrote in an email of Mr. Lam that “despite the difficult times, his painstaking efforts to rebuild the Causeway Bay Books in Taipei over the past few years demonstrated the indomitable spirit of Hong Kongers.”
Pei Wu contributed reporting from Taipei.
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