Lam Wing-kee, a former Hong Kong bookseller who became a symbol of resistance to Beijing's crackdown on speech freedom, has died in Taiwan at the age of 70. The island's official Central News Agency reported that Lam, who had a cancer relapse last year, was admitted to MacKay Memorial Hospital in Taipei on Tuesday, fell into a coma on Wednesday, and died on Thursday evening.
Lam, who previously worked at Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, moved to Taipei in 2019 over fears of legal troubles and reopened the bookstore under the same name in the Taiwanese capital in 2020. Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te offered his condolences in a Facebook post, calling Lam's passing deeply saddening but noting that his courage would not fade.
Lam was one of five people affiliated with Causeway Bay Books who disappeared in late 2015. The store sold books and magazines that were not available in mainland China, including some that purported to reveal secrets about the inside lives of Chinese leaders and the scandals surrounding them. One of the five, publisher Gui Minhai, went missing from his holiday home in Thailand and was later sentenced to 10 years in prison in China on a charge of illegally providing intelligence overseas.
In an act of defiance, Lam gave an explosive account of his experience in 2016 that contradicted official Chinese accounts of what happened to the five booksellers. He said that he was seized by Chinese authorities in October 2015 after crossing the border from Hong Kong.