Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te has said he is deeply saddened by the death of Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee, who publicly recounted being abducted and detained by mainland Chinese authorities in 2015.
Lam died at the age of 70 after a years-long battle with lung cancer, according to Taiwanese media.
Local reports said Lam, who moved to Taiwan in 2019, was admitted to Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei on Tuesday, but his condition worsened and he fell into a coma.
He was pronounced dead on Thursday evening.
Last year, he disclosed that his lung adenocarcinoma had returned and advanced to stage four despite initial treatment.
In a Facebook post on Thursday evening, Lai wrote: “I want to express my deepest condolences to his family, friends and all those who care about freedom and democracy in Hong Kong.”
He said he still remembered the day he walked into the reopened Causeway Bay Bookstore in Taipei and met Lam, adding that the bookstore was “filled with the aroma of books and an atmosphere of freedom”.
Lam spoke gently, Lai said, but his eyes and conviction conveyed a “steadfast commitment to protecting freedom”.
“Lam Wing-kee’s life witnessed the preciousness of freedom of speech and endured the fear and pain brought by authoritarian suppression. But he did not choose silence; instead, he reopened the Causeway Bay Bookstore in Taiwan, making it a place where Hong Kong friends could gather, voice their opinions, and support each other,” he added.
Lai said Lam’s story showed how precious freedom is and that democracy requires the efforts of generations to protect it.
Lam, the former manager of Causeway Bay Books, which sold titles critical of Chinese leaders, was among five Hong Kong booksellers who disappeared in late 2015 and resurfaced across the border.
After being allowed to return to Hong Kong in June 2016 to retrieve customer records, he approached then-lawmaker Albert Ho Chun-yan of the now-defunct Democratic Party, who helped him hold a press conference detailing his detention.
Lam said he had been kidnapped and blindfolded at the border and subsequently held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated, told to make televised confessions and denied access to his family and a lawyer.
The controversy prompted Hong Kong’s justice and security ministers to make a whirlwind visit to Beijing to learn details about the case and open talks with mainland officials on how to fix their cross-border system of mutual notification, as the city government had been kept in the dark for months over the booksellers’ disappearance.
Lam left for Taiwan in 2019 after the government proposed an extradition bill to allow the transfer of fugitives to any jurisdiction with which the city did not have an extradition agreement, including the mainland, Taiwan and Macau. The bill sparked months of anti-government protests and was subsequently shelved.
Lam decided not to return to Hong Kong after Beijing imposed the national security law the following year.
Instead he reopened Causeway Bay Books in Taipei in 2020. Days before the opening, Lam was attacked by a man who splashed red paint on him.
The relaunched bookstore was later visited by then-Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen.
Lam revealed in November 2022 that he had been diagnosed with stage one lung cancer, and that he had undergone surgery to remove cancerous cells and was receiving a three-month course of chemotherapy.
But in July 2025, Lam told the media that his lung adenocarcinoma had returned and progressed to stage four, with some cancer cells close to his heart.
He underwent tumour-removal surgery and later began chemotherapy and gene-targeted therapy, according to reports.
Lam slowly dialled down his business before completely suspending it last month.
