Lam Wing-kee, the Hong Kong dissident bookseller who defied Chinese state detention and fled to Taiwan, died of lung cancer at Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei on Thursday. He was 70. Lam was one of several booksellers associated with Causeway Bay Books who were detained in 2015 after selling publications critical of Chinese political leaders — publications that were available only in Hong Kong and circulated among mainland Chinese visitors and smugglers willing to pay a premium for uncensored political gossip. After more than 400 days in mainland Chinese custody, Lam returned to Hong Kong, held a press conference defying Beijing’s scripted account of his “voluntary” cooperation, and fled to Taiwan in 2019 rather than face extradition under the proposed bill that triggered that year’s mass protests. In Taipei he reopened Causeway Bay Books as a gathering place for the diaspora and the displaced. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te wrote on Friday that Lam’s life “bore witness to the value of freedom of expression, and to the fear and suffering inflicted by authoritarian repression.”
The received wisdom
The liberal obituary will frame Lam’s life — correctly — as a parable of one city’s falling. The Causeway Bay booksellers’ disappearances were the first unambiguous demonstration, before the protests and the National Security Law, that the “one country, two systems” framework was in practice more one than two. That Lam was detained on the mainland during a visit, that a confession was broadcast on Chinese television, that the detention was later revealed to have been conducted without even the pretence of Hong Kong legal procedure — all of this was a preview of what came after. His death in exile in Taipei, while the bookshop he loved was shuttered in Hong Kong long ago and the city’s political landscape has been comprehensively reshaped by the National Security Law, makes him a figure from a tradition that cannot safely be commemorated where it belongs.
The received wisdom here is not wrong. It is, if anything, insufficiently stark. What happened to Hong Kong between 2015 and today is the erasure of a legal and civic culture that took a century and a half to build, in the space of roughly a decade.
A different read
But the more interesting question — and the harder one — is what Lam’s life and death say about the durability of liberal institutions, and about what it means to preserve them when the state that housed them is no longer able or willing to do so.
Lam did not only resist. He rebuilt. The reopening of Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan was not just a symbolic gesture; it was a functioning archive of the political subculture that Beijing had tried to suppress — a physical space where Hong Kongers in exile could read, talk, and remember what the city was. Taiwan’s government recognised this. President Lai’s statement that the bookshop became “a place where friends from Hong Kong could gather, speak out and support one another” describes something that goes beyond individual heroism into institutional memory.
This matters because one of the features of modern authoritarian consolidation — in Hong Kong, in mainland China, in Russia, in Turkey — is that it does not simply imprison dissidents. It attempts to make dissent literally unthinkable by eliminating the institutional infrastructure through which alternative political cultures survive: independent bookshops, independent media, independent courts, independent universities. The Chinese Communist Party’s actions in Hong Kong from 2020 onwards followed a clear sequence: the National Security Law first, then the prosecution of media outlets like Apple Daily, then the restructuring of the electoral system, then the prosecution of pro-democracy figures under security legislation, then the quiet emigration of legal, academic, and journalistic talent that had nowhere left to stand. Lam’s 2015 detention was the prologue.
The right-leaning intellectual tradition that takes ordered liberty seriously — Edmund Burke’s “partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born” — has something to say about this that the progressive cosmopolitan tradition sometimes struggles to articulate. The question is not only whether freedom of expression is a universal right (it is) but whether specific institutions, embedded in specific places with specific histories, can be transplanted and preserved when their native soil is poisoned. The answer from Hong Kong’s diaspora experience is partially encouraging: communities can carry their institutions with them, as Lam carried the bookshop to Taipei. But the loss of the place — of Hong Kong as a functioning liberal city — is not recoverable through diaspora effort alone.
Lam told the BBC in what turned out to be his last interview: “Everyone has their own values. You can’t go against your values, nor can you betray others.” That is a personal statement of integrity. But it also describes the minimum condition for any liberal order to function: that enough people, in enough places, refuse to pretend that what they can see is not what they can see. Hong Kong’s political tradition produced generations of people for whom that refusal was a civic norm. What happens to those norms when the institutions that shaped them are gone is the question that Lam’s death poses most sharply — and that neither Western governments nor the international human rights community has seriously begun to answer.
The China-ethnic-unity law discussed in these pages yesterday, which aims to enforce a single national identity across Uyghur, Tibetan, and Han populations, is of a piece with what happened in Hong Kong. It is the same logic applied at continental scale: the elimination of alternative political grammars before they can produce alternative political possibilities.
What to watch
- The fate of Causeway Bay Books in Taipei: whether it can attract institutional support — from Taiwan’s government, from diaspora organisations, from international free-expression bodies — that would allow it to survive as a functioning archive beyond the deaths of its founders.
- Whether Western governments use Lam’s death as an occasion to review their mechanisms for protecting Hong Kong diaspora communities from mainland Chinese transnational repression — a documented and ongoing phenomenon.
- The trajectory of prosecutions under Hong Kong’s National Security Law; the number of cases and the scale of sentences has continued to expand since 2020, with no sign of the enforcement plateau that some analysts predicted.
- Whether any of the next generation of Hong Kong diaspora leaders in Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia moves from community organisation into formal political life — this is the generational bet that liberal institutions can regenerate outside their place of origin.
— J