Lam Wing-kee

Lam Wing-kee was born in Hong Kong on 16 December 1955, when the territory was a British colony. The New York Times, citing Chen Jianmin (Chan Kin-man) of the Taiwan Association for Hong Kong Studies, reported that his parents had moved from mainland China to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War, roughly ten years before his birth. His ancestral home was Maoming in Guangdong province. He grew up in Hong Kong and later described himself as a Hong Konger who grew up under British rule and held universal values, a self-image that shaped his reaction to his detention decades later.

Lam attended Heung To Middle School in Hong Kong, according to The New York Times and Chinese-language Wikipedia. No university education has been reported. His real education in books came through work: he spent years in book distribution before opening his own shop.

From 1985 to 1989 Lam worked in book distribution at Chung Hwa Book Company, a publisher with mainland Chinese backing. After the June 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, he moved to Tin Yuen Bookshop, a store sympathetic to dissidents.

In 1994 he founded Causeway Bay Books, a small upstairs bookshop in Causeway Bay. For two decades it sold books that mainland visitors prized and could not obtain at home, many of them racy accounts of the private lives and power struggles of senior Communist Party leaders, alongside more serious political criticism. Lam habitually worked long hours and sometimes slept at the shop. In the years before his arrest he quietly carried books into the mainland, often disguised with false covers. He also held a stake in a small trading company through which he reissued Liu Yichang's out of print novel The Drunkard.

In 2014 he sold Causeway Bay Books to Mighty Current Media and remained as store manager. The shop closed in 2016 after the disappearances.

Between October and December 2015, five people connected to Causeway Bay Books and Mighty Current Media disappeared, including co-owner Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen. Lam vanished on 24 October 2015 after crossing the border at Lo Wu into Shenzhen. His wife reported him missing on 5 November; he phoned the family hours later without revealing where he was, and Hong Kong police then treated the case as resolved.

On 4 February 2016 Guangdong authorities confirmed that Lam and two colleagues were in custody. On 28 February he appeared on Phoenix Television confessing to sending banned books to mainland customers. By his later account, he had been taken handcuffed and blindfolded to Ningbo, held in a padded room of under 300 square feet with 24 hour surveillance, interrogated many times by a special central investigation team, and pressured to sign away his right to a lawyer and to contact his family. In spring 2016 he was moved to Shaoguan, where he worked in a library but could not leave.

Mainland police gave a different account in July 2016, saying he had been investigated for illegal business operations after books from the store were mailed to customers in Ningbo, and that he had requested the library job. Lam said the televised confession had been scripted and that he had committed no crime under Hong Kong law.

On 14 June 2016 Lam returned to Hong Kong under instructions to collect a hard drive of customer records and take it back to the mainland. On 16 June, at Kowloon Tong station and on the verge of boarding a train north, he changed his mind and contacted Democratic Party legislator Albert Ho. That evening he held a press conference describing his abduction in detail. He said he had been moved by learning that around 6,000 Hong Kong people had marched for the booksellers, and that the case was no longer about him but about the rights and freedoms of everyone in Hong Kong.

On 18 June 2016 he joined a march from the Causeway Bay Books building toward the Central Government Liaison Office; organisers estimated 6,000 participants and police 1,800 at peak. In 2018 he addressed the tenth Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy about his abduction. His story was dramatised in the opening episode of RTHK's anthology series Below the Lion Rock 2018.

Lam left Hong Kong for Taiwan on 25 April 2019 as the Hong Kong government pressed ahead with an extradition bill that would have allowed transfers to mainland China, where he was still wanted. Taiwan's immigration authorities repeatedly extended his stay.

In September 2019 he launched a crowdfunding campaign to reopen Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan. It reached its NT$2.8 million target in about 20 hours and eventually raised more than NT$5.97 million. On 21 April 2020, a day after receiving a lawyer's letter demanding he stop using the Causeway Bay Books name, he was splashed with red paint by two men in a Taipei cafe; police arrested three suspects the next day. The store reopened on Nanjing West Road in Zhongshan District on 25 April 2020, with flowers and a congratulatory note from President Tsai Ing-wen and a heavy police presence. Tsai visited the shop in May 2020.

The bookstore became a meeting place for Hong Kong exiles; The New York Times reported that Lam slept in a bunk behind the cash register. In 2020 he co-founded Haven Assistance with Brian Leung, Ray Wong and Simon Cheng to advise Hong Kong people seeking refuge abroad. He obtained a Republic of China national identity card in January 2024, and the store moved to Zhongzheng District that year.

After his release Lam became an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Hong Kong government, which he said had failed to protect any of the abducted booksellers. He criticised then Security Secretary Lai Tung-kwok and said he would not seek protection from Hong Kong police.

His position on Hong Kong independence shifted over time. In June 2016 he told Channel NewsAsia it was doable for Hong Kong to seek independence if one country, two systems no longer worked. In a 2017 interview he called independence by 2047 impossible for practical reasons but a useful bargaining chip. After moving to Taiwan he said he supported independence for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, and warned visitors that what happened to Hong Kong could happen to Taiwan. He also spoke in support of Ukraine after Russia's invasion. He told The New York Times Magazine in 2018 that contemporary China was an absurd country and vowed never to return.

Lam was married, and his wife reported him missing in November 2015. The New York Times reported that he was survived by two sons and a former wife, all living in Britain, and that Pastor Huang Chun-sheng, who handled his funeral, declined to give their names for security reasons. Mainland police claimed in 2016 that he had a girlfriend in Shenzhen who helped mail books; The New York Times also noted that his girlfriend lived in Shenzhen. In Taiwan he had no family nearby, and friends from Hong Kong were with him in his final days. His farewell was held as a Christian service.

Lam's decision to break his silence in June 2016 made him an international cause celebre and a lasting emblem of Hong Kong's shrinking freedoms under Beijing. Taiwan's Ministry of Culture described him as an inspiration and role model for democracy, liberty and human rights across borders, and said the Taipei bookstore had become a gathering place for Hong Kong people in Taiwan. Premier Cho Jung-tai said he had shown the world that a bookshop could become one of the strongest bulwarks against the world's largest dictatorship. Chan Kin-man wrote that his efforts to rebuild the store in Taipei showed the indomitable spirit of Hong Kong people.

On 31 July 2026, on the instruction of President Lai Ching-te, Premier Cho Jung-tai presented a posthumous presidential citation (褒揚令) honouring Lam at his farewell service. The citation praised his founding of Causeway Bay Books, his refusal to abandon his principles despite the Causeway Bay Books incident, his advocacy at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, and his defence of free expression, democracy and the rule of law after settling in Taiwan. It was received on the family's behalf.

Lam's story was dramatised in Ding Fung Bo, the first episode of RTHK's Below the Lion Rock 2018, with Lam portrayed by actor Yuen Chi-hung. He was interviewed by many international outlets, including the BBC, VICE News, Al Jazeera's The Listening Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The New York Times Magazine, and a recording of his testimony about his detention was published by the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Lam had been treated for lung cancer, which recurred in 2025. In June 2026 he told the Central News Agency he was temporarily closing the bookstore for health reasons: if his health improved he would reopen it, and if not, he would not. He was admitted, still conscious, to Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei on 30 June 2026, fell into a coma the next day as the cancer spread, and was pronounced dead at 7:01 p.m. on 2 July 2026. He was 70.

President Lai Ching-te said the courage Lam left behind would not disappear. The Mainland Affairs Council offered to help with funeral arrangements. A farewell service was held at Chi-Nan Presbyterian Church in Taipei on 31 July 2026, attended by many Hong Kong people, Mainland Affairs Council minister Chiu Chui-cheng and others. Pastor Huang Chun-sheng recalled that Lam's favourite saying was that the bookseller's counter does not kneel. He was then buried on Taiwan's north coast, at a Christian cemetery in Jinshan, New Taipei.