Opinion | Lam Wing-kee's Cigarette and the Fate of Hong Kong

Lam Wing-kee (林榮基), the Causeway Bay Books manager whose 2016 press conference exposed his secret detention in mainland China, died on July 2, 2026, at Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei. He was 70. The cause was a recurrence of lung adenocarcinoma. Lam had no family in Taiwan; he died in the company of friends.

Before the Causeway Bay Books affair, Lam was nobody in particular. Born in 1955 and raised in Hong Kong, he entered the book trade in 1985 as a distributor for the mainland-backed Chung Hwa Book Company. After the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989, he left his state-linked employer for the independent Tianyuan Bookstore — a decision that reveals a moral compass, but one that falls well short of making him an anti-communist activist or a democracy campaigner. He was simply an ordinary Hong Konger who, after Tiananmen, no longer wished to work for a mainland-controlled institution.

In 1994 he founded Causeway Bay Books, a shop specializing in titles banned on the mainland. In 2014 he sold it to Mighty Current Media and stayed on as manager. By the time the disappearances began in 2015, he did not even own the store. He was an employee — a shop manager hired to run day-to-day operations.

He was not a politician, an activist, a journalist, or an intellectual. He was not a public figure by any reasonable definition. He was a bookseller who spent three decades quietly finding and selling books in a niche corner of Hong Kong's cultural economy.

It is precisely because he was so ordinary that what happened to him was so devastating.

A brief recap. In 2015, five people connected to Causeway Bay Books vanished in succession. Four were detained while traveling in or transiting through mainland China or abroad — including the store's owner, Gui Minhai (桂民海), a Swedish citizen who disappeared in Thailand. The most shocking case was that of shareholder Lee Bo (李波): a British passport holder with no record of leaving Hong Kong, he disappeared from within the city's borders and later surfaced in mainland custody. While detained, all five delivered televised "confessions" bearing the unmistakable hallmarks of coercion.

In June 2016, Lam was permitted a brief return to Hong Kong — ostensibly to retrieve the bookstore's accounts — on the understanding that he would go back to the mainland and continue cooperating with investigators. After stepping outside, he stopped, lit a cigarette, and changed his mind. He called a press conference and publicly disclosed the eight months he had spent in mainland detention, becoming the only one of the five to tell the truth on the record.

The Causeway Bay Books affair is one of the turning points of modern Hong Kong politics. To grasp its historical weight, one must first understand why the 2019 extradition bill crisis mobilized people on such an extraordinary scale. That crisis was not ignited by a single event. It was the simultaneous combustion of three layers of accumulated fear.

The first layer was the death of democratic hope. The 2014 Umbrella Movement — in which Hong Kongers used entirely peaceful means to demand genuine universal suffrage — was met with flat refusal and a police clearance. Those who believed in nonviolent, law-abiding civic action were left without a path forward.

The second layer was the radicalization of local identity. After the Umbrella Movement, part of Hong Kong society concluded that the moderate road had failed and began confronting more fundamental questions of identity. Localist voices, including arguments for a distinct Hong Kong nationhood, grew markedly louder around 2016.

The third layer was the fear of losing personal freedom and the rule of law. The Causeway Bay Books affair struck this layer directly — and it was the broadest layer of all, cutting across class and political affiliation. You did not need a political position. You did not need to support democracy or localism. You only needed to be an ordinary person living in Hong Kong to be afraid.

Hong Kongers' trust in "one country, two systems" rested on two concrete commitments.

First, freedom of expression. Deng Xiaoping once said Hong Kongers could criticize the Communist Party. This was not a lofty declaration of principle but a specific, practical promise: what you say is your business, and no one will come after you for it.

Second, the rule of law. The Shenzhen River was a real dividing line — mainland law on one bank, Hong Kong's common law on the other. As long as you were in Hong Kong, Hong Kong law protected you.

Together these formed the psychological floor of security for Hong Kong residents. You did not need to love the Communist Party or believe in democracy. You only needed to know: stay within Hong Kong, avoid making trouble on the mainland, and you were safe.

In 2015, the Causeway Bay Books affair shattered that floor — in ways more complex than most people recognized at the time.

Consider what Causeway Bay Books actually was. The shop sold books banned on the mainland — politically sensitive titles trading in party intrigue and leadership gossip. Yet the local market for such books was small. The store's primary customers were not Hong Kong democrats or ordinary residents but visiting mainland officials.

Those officials bought banned books not out of opposition — quite the reverse. They wanted to read the political winds: who was rising, who was falling, which faction to avoid backing. The information circulated freely online, but mainland internet controls blocked access to it; in Hong Kong it could be bought in print. Most of these books were digests of news and rumors already in circulation — no exclusive intelligence, no classified documents. The market was shrinking anyway as information grew easier to find elsewhere.

But this points to a structural significance worth pausing on: the very existence of Causeway Bay Books was "one country, two systems" in daily operation. The same books were illegal on one side of the Shenzhen River and legal on the other. Two legal systems coexisted, each governing its own bank. The bookstore filled a vacuum created by mainland information controls — and those filling it included people from inside the mainland's own system. This was not subversion. It was the most mundane, everyday consequence of the framework working as designed.

Beijing's decision to crush it amounted to a declaration that such coexistence would no longer be tolerated — that two genuinely distinct systems could not operate independently, and that ultimately only one standard would prevail. What the affair destroyed was not merely the personal freedom of five individuals. It was the credibility of "one country, two systems" as a framework that actually functioned.

That mainland security agents operated in Hong Kong was no secret before 2015. But their targets followed a discernible pattern: they went after "their own people" — officials who had fled with embezzled funds, defected agents, businessmen under mainland warrants, losers in internal power struggles. Such people came to Hong Kong because its law barred their extradition. When mainland agents spirited them away, they were enforcing the mainland's internal discipline on members of its own system.

Hong Kong society's reaction to such episodes was always mixed — some felt uneasy, others shrugged. But most ordinary Hong Kongers could reassure themselves: this is their internal affair, mainlanders dealing with mainlanders. As long as I am not that kind of person, I am safe.

The Causeway Bay Books affair broke that premise. Those taken were not mainland fugitives or defectors. They were local Hong Kong residents running a business entirely legal under Hong Kong law. For the first time, mainland security agents had unmistakably reached out and grabbed ordinary Hong Kong citizens who were not "their own people" in any sense.

That qualitative leap was the real rupture. Earlier operations could at least be rationalized as "apprehending fugitives." This time, mainland legal logic was imposed on people and businesses operating lawfully within Hong Kong. The self-protective reasoning of "as long as I'm not that kind of person, I'll be fine" collapsed — because Lam Wing-kee was the perfect embodiment of "not that kind of person," and he was taken anyway.

Had the person seized been a prominent democracy activist, Hong Kongers could have said: he knew the risk he was choosing. Had it been a journalist with a long record of criticizing Beijing, similar logic could have kept the danger at arm's length. But Lam was a shop manager, an employee, doing something entirely legal, who had never publicly engaged in politics. He destroyed the logic of "I don't do politics, so I'll be fine" — because he was that logic made flesh, and he was taken anyway.

The message was this: whether or not you "do politics" is not for you to decide. It is for them to decide. Where the line is drawn is not your call.

There was a third dimension. Gui Minhai — the Swedish citizen who vanished in Thailand — eliminated yet another psychological escape route: "If all else fails, emigrate." His case showed that changing your nationality and leaving Hong Kong might not be enough. In Beijing's framework, "you are Chinese first" respects neither geography nor passports. If you are Chinese, you remain subject to its authority wherever you are and whatever citizenship you hold.

At his press conference, Lam explained why he had changed his mind: he had seen 6,000 strangers march in Hong Kong on his behalf. "If we don't speak up," he said, "Hong Kong is beyond saving."

That he could hold that press conference at all — and that 6,000 people could rally publicly in response — testified to a civic space that still existed in Hong Kong at that moment. By the time of his death, that space had ceased to exist.

What no one anticipated was that Lam's truth-telling did not only produce retreat. It also produced radicalization. More people began testing the limits; the political spectrum shifted toward confrontation. Beijing had intended the affair as a show of force. Part of the result was that some Hong Kongers became harder to intimidate, not easier.

The larger shock came in 2019, when the government proposed amending the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance to allow extraditions to the mainland. For many Hong Kongers this was not an abstract legal question but a very specific equation: the Causeway Bay Books affair was illegal rendition; the extradition bill was rendition legalized. Beijing had already shown it could take people without any legal mechanism. Now that process would become lawful and permanent. Illegal rendition had been terrifying enough. Legal rendition would be the definitive, irreversible end.

This is why 2019 mobilized so broad a coalition, including many who had never touched politics. It was no longer a dispute between the pro-democracy and pro-establishment camps but a concrete threat facing every ordinary Hong Konger. Lam Wing-kee was the first person to make that threat tangible. And the extradition crisis became the dividing line between the Hong Kong that was and the Hong Kong that Beijing made of it.

Lam's truth shook Hong Kong; the shock deepened fear; fear intensified resistance; resistance brought 2019; and 2019 brought the National Security Law. At every step individuals made choices, and no one controlled the outcome. He spoke the truth to save Hong Kong, and his conscience was clear. But he almost certainly did not foresee, in that moment, where his truth would lead.

This is not only Lam Wing-kee's story. History is full of people who made a choice they believed was right, then watched that choice get swept up and carried somewhere they never intended to go. That cigarette he lit. That press conference he called. What they changed, and what they did not — perhaps even he could not say with certainty.

*The author is a current affairs commentator based in the United States.  （Related： Opinion | China's JL-3 Missile Test Caps a Week of Pressure on Taiwan ｜ Latest ）

​Original Article in Chinese​