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.
