Yaxue Cao, October 7, 2026
1.
I didn’t know Mr. Lam Wing-kee well, having met him only twice.
In late April 2017, I learned from Ann Lau’s newsletter that Lam Wing-kee (林榮基) was coming to Washington. I had never met Ann, and knew little about her other than that she was based in Los Angeles. I guessed that she was from Hong Kong. Her organization, the Visual Artists Guild, commemorates the Tiananmen Square massacre each June and may organize other events as well. I emailed her to say that I very much wanted to meet Mr. Lam. By then, nearly a year had passed since he had held a press conference exposing the details of his eight-month secret detention in mainland China, which came to be known as the Causeway Bay Bookstore incident.
We met at a Chinese restaurant in Maryland, outside Washington: Ann, Lam Wing-kee, Chen Guangcheng, and me. I remember that the restaurant was almost empty. The four of us sat at a large round table in a corner, which made the emptiness around us feel even more pronounced. Guangcheng — a prominent Chinese dissident — was clearly the main person intended for Lam to meet, and I was just tagging along.
After we sat down, I said, “I read Man Is Not Made for Defeat more than once. It’s very well written. I love it.”
Ann, who was sitting beside me, objected without skipping a beat: “It’s not well written! Not at all!”
I was taken aback, speechless. I couldn’t tell if Ann was being serious or just bantering like a girl teasing her younger brother.
Man Is Not Made for Defeat was Lam’s account of his 8-month abduction in mainland China. I liked Lam’s prose. His exquisite sensibility coursed through the pages nimbly like a symphony. But I was not going to argue with Ann over an aesthetic judgment.
Across the table, Lam Wing-kee showed little reaction either to my praise or to Ann’s jab, as though the exchange had nothing to do with him. In fact, he barely spoke throughout the evening. But I took him in, feeling that, to some extent, I understood the man simply by having read his work.
After dinner, we walked to the metro station together. On the platform, I asked, “Could I take a picture with you?” — something I rarely ask of people. We took a photo together, said goodbye, and boarded trains heading in opposite directions.
2.
In 2015, the year of the Causeway Bay Bookstore disappearances, Lam Wing-kee turned 60. He had spent his entire life working with books. He started out at Chung Hwa Book Company, a storied publisher founded in Shanghai in 1912. It opened its Hong Kong branch in 1927 during the Republic of China era, specializing in ancient texts as well as works on Chinese culture, history, and philosophy. In the 1980s, it came under the ownership and management of the Chinese government’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong and its mainland counterpart, as did several similarly long-established Hong Kong publishers.
In the mid-1990s, prior to Hong Kong’s handover, Lam left Chung Hwa to open a small bookstore in Causeway Bay, a bustling commercial district on Hong Kong Island.
In an era when large corporate bookstores were gradually coming to dominate the market, Hong Kong was home to a niche of small, independent bookstores. They were mostly crammed into spaces no more than a few hundred square feet on upper floors rather than at street level to save on rent, earning the name “upstairs bookstores.” Causeway Bay Bookstore was one of them.
Lam sat behind the counter and sold books for twenty years. Everyone in the book business in Hong Kong knew him. In 2014, Gui Minhai, a mainlander who had acquired Swedish citizenship and moved to Hong Kong recently to pursue publishing, bought Causeway Bay Bookstore with two other business partners. They used it as a retail outlet for their newly established Mighty Current Publishing House. Lam stayed on to run the day-to-day business.
Gui set his eyes on a specific area: books on Chinese political insider reportage and the private lives of top officials that run the gamut from genuine disclosures, personal memoirs and political analyses to sensational accounts of power struggles, scandals, and romantic affairs of the Chinese Communist Party’s top echelons.
They were known as the “forbidden books” in mainland China. But it had a market. Among the tens of thousands of mainland tourists and businesspeople pouring into Hong Kong each month, there were buyers. But they were afraid to carry the books across the border themselves for fear of customs inspections. Lam regularly hauled suitcases filled with customer orders to Shenzhen to mail them out locally.
A few years back, he had been intercepted at the border crossing and was taken to a police station for questioning. After hours of interrogation, Chinese national security officers determined he was merely a small-time bookseller. They confiscated the books and released him.
However, when he was stopped again on October 24, 2015, the situation was different. He did not know that just a few days prior, Gui Minhai had been kidnapped from Thailand to China. Nor did he know that on the same day and shortly thereafter, the two other shareholders of Mighty Current Publishing House and a business manager were also taken to the mainland.
The year before, in 2014, when the “Occupy Central” movement unfolded in Hong Kong, the Communist Party leaders in Beijing grimaced with unease at the surging crowds of protesters and their calls for freedom. What they perceived, as was made clear in the state media, was that Hong Kong had become an “anti-communist base” and a “springboard” for a “color revolution” against the communist regime. They resolved to abolish the “measured autonomy” (适度放手) that Hong Kong enjoyed and replace it with a state of “total control” (全面管治).
Lam might have sensed the shifting of the political winds. How could he not? But reading him, you get the sense that the default assumption of a Hong Konger like Lam was that Hong Kong was forever.
From Shenzhen, his handlers put a duckbill cap on his head, blindfolded him, and escorted him onto a high-speed train. Roughly ten hours later, hundreds of miles away, he was taken off the train. From the edge of his blindfold, he caught a glimpse of a light box display of “Ningbo.” A vehicle eventually brought him to his destination: a room with a floor plan similar to that of a hotel room inside a building. On the soles of the plastic flip-flops for him to wear, he saw the characters “Ningbo” once more.
He was subjected to interrogation repeatedly, day after day. To his surprise, his interrogators already possessed a ledger of the bookstore’s mail-order sales. They wanted to know the identity of every buyer. They brought in a stack of books published by Mighty Current, including Xi Jinping’s Internal Speeches, Crisis in the Central Army, and Report on the Erotic Activities of Senior CCP Officials, demanding to know who wrote them. Apart from the few authors who used their real names, Lam genuinely didn’t know who authored those sensationalist volumes. And he told the interrogators in all sincerity: “Most of these Mighty Current publications are nonsense cobbled together and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”
But they were in fact regarded with utmost seriousness, or the entire crew of Mighty Current and himself wouldn’t have been abducted.
He used every opportunity when being led out of the room to observe his surroundings — it was a compound surrounded by mountains on three sides, unmarked, with a large electric gate.
He was kept there for nearly five months. To keep track of time, he pulled a thread from his clothes and tied a knot each day. The room and every detail of it, he realized, was designed to prevent suicide. He could understand why someone kept in such isolation would want to end their life. The thought had crossed his mind as well.
Ironically, he probably didn’t know that he was in fact treated exceptionally well by the standards of China’s innocuous sounding “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location.” He was not deprived of sleep for days and nights on end until he fainted; he was not beaten or kicked, nor shocked with electric batons; he was not forced to sit motionless inside a small square drawn on the floor for a dozen hours at a time; nor was he locked into an iron chair until his underwear fused with his skin. In his room, the window curtains were even drawn open during the day, allowing him to occasionally step up to the window to gaze outside — at the mountains, the nearby scenery, and the passage of time from morning to evening.
3.
What shocked him the most was the gangster style of the entire process.
I mentioned before that they put a duckbill cap on him and blindfolded him when taking him on the train. The practice appears to be some sort of standard with political cases in mainland China. Three years ago, when I interviewed a detainee associated with the 2015 crackdown on Chinese human rights lawyers, he recalled being escorted on a high-speed train from Fuzhou to Beijing in the exact same garb. It was as if they’d watched too many Hong Kong gangster movies and copied to a tee what the triads do to their abductees.
The first thing Lam wanted to know was what offense he had committed. He asked the interrogators. He asked the guards 24/7 in his room in three shifts. None gave him an answer. The two interrogators disclosed no names and identities of theirs. Eventually, the leader of the two said his surname was Shi. But it mattered little whether it was true or false: if he said his name was Su, he would have made his identity no clearer.
Only after arriving in Ningbo did Lam discover that they had also detained and brought his girlfriend, who had nothing to do with the bookstore, to Ningbo as a tool to blackmail him.
During his first interrogation, “Mr. Shi” asked Lam to sign two documents: a “Voluntary Waiver of Right to Notify Family” and a “Voluntary Waiver of Right to Retain Legal Counsel.” Aware that he was now in a universe where 2 plus 2 equals 5, Lam resigned and signed both documents, more for self-preservation than submission. Indeed, one may argue that resistance in a void was useless.
Coming up next, he was to write a confession acknowledging that he had engaged in “illegal operation of book distribution.” The prominently printed letterhead The People’s Republic of China jumped out for Lam’s attention as it was designed so.
After confession came a letter of repentance. Lam struggled to fill an A4 page. What he wrote was as awkward as an essay cranked out by an inattentive schoolboy: “Because I committed a crime, I now sincerely express my repentance to the Chinese government….”
No, it was not good. Rewriting wasn’t any easier. Eventually, “Mr. Shi” stepped in to “help” him, jotting down a few points for Lam to copy. He did as he was instructed. Perhaps that was the plan after all.
Many sessions of video recording were staged: confessing on camera, repenting on camera, each session preceded by rehearsals. Lam must have been an awful actor. One take, two takes, three takes…until it was satisfactory to some reviewers higher up and out of sight. Sometimes they filmed him in a room inside the building, other times they drove him, blindfolded, to a different location.
“Mr. Shi” was both the playwright and the director. On one occasion, another actor joined the filming. An uniformed female police officer Lam had just crossed paths with in the corridor stepped into the studio moments later dressed in plainclothes, playing the role of a witness. Lam couldn’t believe his eyes!
One day toward the end of his time in Ningbo, two men entered his room and ordered him to stand up straight. Slamming their fists on the desk, the pair took turns cursing at Lam: “Do you know who we are? We are from the Beijing Special Task Team. By publishing these books, you are defaming our national leaders — an irredeemable crime! We can exercise dictatorship over you for ten or twenty years, or even until you die, and no one in Hong Kong would ever know! We could crush you to death like a bug!”
I suppose it was a necessary scene for a farcical mafia movie to work.
Throughout his detention, Lam racked his brain and could not fathom what exactly they were trying to investigate. But it was in fact rather simple: it was all about a handful of coarse tabloid-style books. Lam was simply blindsided by his world as a Hong Konger to understand that power could be brandished and applied so childishly. He had read enough books and was not ignorant about the regime, but still, it confounded him that a vast and powerful country like China, the world’s second-greatest power, could act the way it did.
More than misfortune, he experienced absurdity.
Of course, Mr. Gui Minhai topped the absurdity chart when he was trotted out on Chinese national TV announcing that he was giving up his Swedish citizenship and needed no help from Sweden. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 and has not been heard from again since.
4.
By the end of March the following year, they granted Lam “bail pending trial” and took him to Shaoguan, a city in northern Guangdong. He stayed in a hotel arranged by his handlers, and he was assigned a job to shelve books in the children’s section of the local public library. He was required to report every day to a local police officer assigned to watch him: Did you meet anyone? Did you reveal your address to anyone? Did you receive calls from unknown callers? Did you contact the Hong Kong media, and so on.
Judging by subsequent developments, with the exception of Gui Minhai, Lam Wing-kee and the three others were not the primary targets of the Causeway Bay Bookstore abductions. As public opinion around the world and protests in Hong Kong continued unabated, the mainland authorities felt the need to clean up the mess. Among the four people they intended to release, only Lam Wing-kee had no relatives or connections in mainland China, meaning there was no “soft spot” or leverage that the Chinese authorities could use to control him. Lam had been compliant, but they somehow did not trust him. Something had to be done to put Lam in a bind.
Before leaving Ningbo, “Mr. Shi” struck up a bond with Lam: With his personal guarantee, he had pleaded with his superiors to bail Lam out, and in return, Lam must cooperate with him, otherwise this would lead to “Mr. Shi’s” ruin.
One evening, shortly after arriving in Shaoguan, someone knocked on his door. Lam knew nobody in Shaoguan except for the police officer in charge of monitoring him. Opening the door, he saw two young women staring at him in silence. When he tried to close the door, they blocked it with their feet to stop him and tried to force their way into his room. He told them it must be a mistake, but they showed no intention of leaving. Then, he made a feint of peering out into the hallway to distract their attention, and managed to slam the door shut.
In June, Lam’s handlers arranged for him to return to Hong Kong for 24 hours to retrieve the sales computers from the bookstore. Before departure, “Mr. Shi” assured Lam that, in a few months, after Gui Minhai was tried and sentenced, he and the other three would be able to return to Hong Kong. “As long as you keep quiet, the matter will come to an end.”
Do as they say, Lam assured himself once again, “after a few months, everyone will return to Hong Kong and resume our peaceful life just like before.”
5.
After entering Hong Kong, the first thing Lam did, as he was told, was to close his case with the police at the Immigration Department, declaring that he was safe and needed no help.
He checked into the hotel arranged for him, Caritas Bianchi Lodge in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon. He knew someone must be monitoring his movements, but he couldn’t be sure. Even if no one was following him, the Xiaomi phone they gave him could track his location. He no longer cared because he had no intention to break away.
It wasn’t until he returned to Hong Kong that he truly realized the uproar the Causeway Bay Bookstore disappearances had caused. And people marched in protest. He was touched. He didn’t expect that so many Hong Kongers would turn out for the sake of individuals as unimportant as him and his colleagues. On the MTR, he looked at the Hong Kongers — everyone was carefree, while he alone was a secret prisoner. He had wanted to stay in Hong Kong for two days to deal with a few personal matters, but they wouldn’t allow him.
As if waking from a coma, he asked himself, “What is wrong with me?” “I am no longer a Hong Konger.”
Anger erupted from within:
“And what was even more terrifying in the future was that the one surnamed Shi had told me in Shaoguan that, after returning to Hong Kong, I would still work at the bookstore, and he would still contact me. I was to report the situation here to him through writing or photography; they wanted to gather information in Hong Kong, especially those coming to buy political books, and I was to act as his informant from then on. My goodness, not only would I lose my freedom in the future, I would even have to betray others. If I submit today, I will become an accomplice in the future, leading to more people to submit. If I sell out my soul today, I will force others to sell out their consciences in the future; if I become one of them today, more people will join their ranks in the future.”
Just like that, in a matter of a couple of hours back to Hong Kong, the whole game laid itself bare in front of Lam.
Repeatedly he said to himself, “The bullying has gone too far.” “The bullying has really gone too far.”
I paused at the phrase “the bullying has gone too far” (欺人太甚). Lam used a very primitive term. What it expresses is a primal anger from which revolt, in all forms and across all ages, against the abuse of power stems from. The modern values of human rights, the rule of law, and freedom all lie in curbing this beast from wielding its power at will.
The Causeway Bay Bookstore was still in business. It had since been bought by a stranger, and Li Bo — one of Gui’s partners who had been also taken to the mainland but clearly had returned and resumed life in Hong Kong — and his wife were running it.
Lam got the computer but later that day discovered the store had given him the wrong one. He was reluctant to hand over the computer containing readers’ data, but giving them the wrong computer wouldn’t do either. He didn’t know what to do and needed more time to weigh it. He decided to notify “Mr. Shi” of the mistake late at night so he could stay an extra day to swap the wrong computer for the correct one.
Having made up his mind, he went out to stroll down the Temple Street Night Market. He was overwhelmed:
“I love Hong Kong so much… I like watching those small vendors, even though some might cheat tourists; I like watching those fortune-tellers put on airs, guiding lost souls through their mazes, even though they can’t be taken seriously; I even went under the arcades to look at the prostitutes. I like looking at the small roadside eateries, especially those spilling out onto the street. I like watching the looks on the thousands of diners eating. I like Hong Kongers everywhere, I like the quality of Hong Kongers, I like watching Hong Kongers help people on the street, I like watching Hong Kongers run red lights, I love the efficiency of Hong Kongers.
“I raised my phone and took pictures whenever I wanted, not worrying about being followed and knowing that tonight I was still a Hong Konger and needed not fret.”
I must confess that, it wasn’t until the third or the fourth reading of Lam’s account that this burst of love for Hong Kong hit me in the face.
That said, without those eight months of humiliation, helplessness, and anger, Lam Wing-kee might never have realized how deeply he loved Hong Kong and what it meant to be a Hong Konger with such clarity.
During dinner with his sister and brother-in-law, Lam observed a line on his brother-in-law’s phone screen: “When the attitude is right, happiness follows.” His mind being an incredible sensor, it resonated with him there and then and made its way into his prose without elaboration.
His serenata continued. After dinner, he saw his sister and brother-in-law off, “then I turned onto Portland Street, passing Langham Place. It was a weekday. On weekends after eight in the evening, this place would be a sea of people. I walked toward the direction of Yau Ma Tei, sometimes turning into Shanghai Street and then down Portland Street again. I wanted to see as much as I could. I couldn’t bear to leave Hong Kong.”
He stayed up all night reading news on his phone. Six thousand Hong Kongers marched to protest the disappearances of the five men of the Causeway Bay Bookstore, with Legislative Council members leading the way. He was deeply moved. So many Hong Kongers were “helping me find my lost freedom and dignity.”
The next day, he went back to the bookstore, swapped the computer, and came to the train station at noon for border crossing to Shenzhen as was expected. He had yet to make up his mind. He worried that if he broke his promise, his colleagues might face retaliation. His girlfriend was still in mainland China. Would he be too selfish if he didn’t return? The clock was ticking. He was already past the appointment.
He didn’t know that the others had already made bargains with their captors. If he boarded that train, in 45 minutes, he would have also sealed his bargain. The idea was unbearable.
“But it cannot be like this,” he argued with himself. “This is not just about the bookstore, nor is it just about the few of us.” Anxious, he smoked and smoked again. Then he remembered a poem by Shu Shing-sing titled ‘A Desk’ that he had read it when he was young:
“I have never seen
A desk on its knees,
But I have seen
Scholars on their knees.”
Lam was not to be a scholar on his knees. Dignity triumphed over fear at the last moment. “I flicked away the half-smoked cigarette and changed my itinerary.”
6.
Hong Kong in 2016 was already haunted by creeping shadows.
Lam Wing-kee moved into a safe house. One dusk at the end of July, a month after his break-away press conference, he set out to write his account, using a line from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as his title. The opening paragraph is also positively Hemingwayesque:
“Pulling back the curtains, the sunlight flooded in. The clouds on the horizon rolled low, pressing the Lei Yue Mun area into a tiny patch. Sky and sea blended into one, and hardly any vessels are on the water. … The dusk was approaching, but the setting sun was still dazzling.”
He wrote in one sitting from sunset to late night. Having penned the last paragraph, he walked over to the window again:
“The streetlights reflected in the typhoon shelter bobbed up and down. Lights flickered from thousands of homes in the highrise apartments on the right. Not far away on an overpass, two MTR trains, glowing with light, crossed paths. Below, scattered cars raced along the curved highway like track athletes, unspooling elegant arcs.”
In February 2019, the Hong Kong government submitted the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill to the Legislative Council. The draft stipulated that as long as a “fugitive” suspected of committing one of 37 types of crimes in mainland China was found in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong authorities could transfer them to China without any judicial process, requiring only the approval of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong and a judge. Civil society saw the malice of this ordinance, dubbing it the “Extradition to China Ordinance” (送中法). Taking the Causeway Bay Bookstore case as an example, with the extradition ordinance, Chinese agents would no longer need to brave international public condemnation to abduct people from Hong Kong; instead, the Hong Kong government would “legally” hand them over to mainland China.
Lam Wing-kee would fit the bill perfectly.
In April, before the outbreak of protests in Hong Kong with tens of thousands taking part, Lam left Hong Kong permanently and went into exile in Taiwan.
In January 2020, when I was in Taiwan to observe that year’s presidential election, and I met up with Lam Wing-kee. He waited for me at the exit of the Zhongshan MRT station, and we walked to his bookstore. I had already seen the news about Lam reopening the Causeway Bay Bookstore in Taipei, which by then had already become a symbol of resistance.
The bookstore was located in a bustling commercial area of Taipei, still an “upstairs bookstore.” When I walked in, I was quite surprised to find it was a room of only about 300 square feet. Books already lined the shelves against the walls, and unopened cardboard boxes were lying on the floor. Right by the entrance was a small bathroom. He lived there too, pointing to a bed that was folded against the wall during the day and pulled down to sleep at night.
We went to a nearby coffee shop to drink tea and chat.
The bookstore hadn’t gone smoothly, he said. A Taiwanese who had pledged to invest had backed out, and a Hong Kong investor had withdrawn, reportedly under pressure. But with the encouragement of many, it was slated to open in April that year.
I ventured out to say that he seemed to me to be steeped in literature. He said he seldom read the books sold in his own bookstore. I could readily picture him sitting behind the counter at the Causeway Bay store, buried in reading for twenty years.
Back to his prose. He portrayed a cast of characters effortlessly, without any “portraying”: the chief interrogator “Mr. Shi,” the doctor who brought him snow which Lam had never seen before, the two ferocious fiends from Beijing, Officer Zhou in Shaoguan, and even the library director. I’m sure he could have written a much longer piece, even a book, but really, he missed nothing in his 18,000-character account.
I was curious how he got his training besides reading. He said that for many years he had been a member of a small literary club, sharing his work with its members.
What about publication? I asked. For some reason, I immediately regretted asking.
I don’t remember his exact words, but he replied, to the effect, that there were many good books but there were more bad ones, and he didn’t have to contribute to the latter.
I told him that someone had translated A Man Is Not Made for Defeat into English, but I felt the translation was not as good as I’d like to see. He said, “You can translate it again.”
That was the last time I saw Lam Wing-kee. Two years ago I read in the news that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. When I heard news of him again this year, he had passed away in Taipei on July 2. He was buried in a cemetery on the northern coast of Taiwan.
In the seven years since Lam left Hong Kong, free press have been shut down; protests — small or big, loud or subtle — have become a national security offense; marches are out of question; long-standing civil society organizations have been razed clean; pro-democracy lawmakers in the Legislative Council are booted out and thrown into jail; independent bookstores are on their way to extinction; and the sea of candlelight in Victoria Park is no more. Jails are filled with political prisoners.
In hindsight, Mr. Lam Wing-kee’s love for Hong Kong is heartbreaking.
Yau Ma Tei is perhaps still bustling with crowds, but there are no more free Hong Kongers.
Yaxue Cao is the editor of this website. Follow her on X @YaxueCao
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