Lam Wing-kee was praised by Republic of China Premier Cho Jung-tai for defying the Chinese Communist Party at a special ceremony held on July 31 just before a memorial service for Lam, who at age 70 had succumbed to cancer. Having traveled from Britain, his son was on hand to accept a posthumously awarded presidential citation in recognition of his father’s fight for freedom and democracy.
Several years before the National Security Law of 2020 was imposed on Hong Kong, the CCP had kidnapped Lam and several others associated with his bookstore or with a publishing partner of the store (The Straits Times, July 31, 2026).
At the end of 2015, Lam and four other publishers of gossip-filled tomes on China’s leaders vanished, later resurfacing in mainland custody and making televised confessions.
Their disappearance caused widespread alarm in Hong Kong.
Lam was allowed back into Hong Kong in June 2016 on condition that he pick up a hard drive listing the bookstore’s customers and return to the mainland.
But he skipped bail and went public with explosive testimony detailing how he was blindfolded by mainland police after crossing the border at Shenzhen and had spent months being interrogated.
In April 2019, Lam fled to Taiwan after Hong Kong announced plans to allow extraditions to China, a move which sparked months of huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in the financial hub later that year.
Lam reopened his store Causeway Bay Books in Taipei in 2020 and frequently urged people to safeguard the island’s democratic system.
Premier Cho said that the latest crackdown on Hong Kong booksellers “once again demonstrates, in the starkest terms, how the authoritarian system is steadily destroying Hong Kong and pushing it toward an era in which books themselves are banned.”
One of the more than one hundred attendees of the memorial service remembered these words of Lam: “You have freedom and democracy in Taiwan, and you must cherish them. Our freedom and democracy are already gone.”
Also see:
Wikipedia: “Causeway Bay Books”
