TAIPEI, Taiwan — Lam Wing-kee, a former Hong Kong bookseller who rose to international prominence as a symbol of defiance against Beijing’s suppression of free expression, has passed away in Taiwan at the age of 70, according to the island’s official Central News Agency, which cited an unnamed source.
The news agency did not disclose a cause of death, but reported that Lam had experienced a cancer relapse last year. He was admitted to MacKay Memorial Hospital in Taipei on Tuesday, slipped into a coma on Wednesday, and died Thursday evening.
Lam had previously worked at Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong before relocating to Taipei in 2019, driven by concerns over potential legal jeopardy. He reopened the bookstore under its original name in the Taiwanese capital in 2020.
Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te shared his condolences on Facebook following the news of Lam’s death.
“The passing of Mr Lam Wing-kee is deeply saddening, but the courage he left behind would not fade,” Lai wrote. “Taiwan will remember that a Hong Kong bookstore worker once told us in the most ordinary yet most steadfast way how precious freedom is and reminded us that democracy requires the efforts of generation after generation to defend it.”
Lam was among five individuals connected to Causeway Bay Books who vanished in late 2015. The shop had been known for selling books and magazines that claimed to expose private details about Chinese leaders and the controversies surrounding them.
Among the five, publisher Gui Minhai disappeared from his vacation home in Thailand and was subsequently sentenced to ten years in a Chinese prison on charges of illegally providing intelligence to foreign entities.
In a bold act of defiance, Lam held a press conference in 2016 where he publicly contradicted the Chinese government’s version of events surrounding the disappearances of the five booksellers.
Lam described being taken by Chinese authorities in October 2015 after he crossed from Hong Kong into the mainland city of Shenzhen. He said he was blindfolded and placed on a 13-hour train journey to the eastern city of Ningbo, where he was held under around-the-clock surveillance in a room for five months, monitored by rotating two-person teams.
At a packed news conference in Hong Kong, he recounted being compelled to appear on Chinese state television to deliver a confession to alleged crimes.
As recently as June, Lam told the Central News Agency that he had temporarily shuttered his Taipei bookstore due to health concerns and could not predict when it would reopen.
Since the large-scale anti-government demonstrations that swept Hong Kong in 2019, Chinese and Hong Kong authorities have imposed increasingly strict controls over the territory. In June, Hong Kong police arrested two individuals on suspicion of distributing seditious publications and receiving funding from foreign political organizations, acting under a recently enacted national security law.
