From booksellers to young protesters, people who have fled mainland China’s crackdown in Hong Kong have come to Taiwan for what they thought at first would be a short-term refuge – and is now an evolving community in exile
The Globe And Mail
Date: July 14, 2020
By: Nathan Vanderklippe, Asian Correspondent
Lam Wing-kee, a bookseller from Hong Kong, stands this past January in the office space in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, where he would reopen Causeway Books. His old store in Hong Kong was shut down after he fled the Chinese territory, saying Chinese forces seized and interrogated him for selling politically sensitive books.
NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
The titles on display include those now stripped from libraries and schools in Hong Kong, where Mr. Lam once ran the original Causeway Books, a shop peddling historical tomes and thinly sourced political thrillers to readers thirsty for knowledge and gossip about China’s top leadership. But in 2015, he vanished, reappearing only many months later saying that he was seized by Chinese forces and brutally interrogated.
He left for Taiwan in the midst of last year’s Hong Kong protests against rising Chinese influence, sparked by a proposed extradition bill that if passed, he feared, could be used to return him to China’s justice system. His new Taipei location opened less than a month before Chinese authorities said they would impose a new security law on Hong Kong, creating a punitive new legal regime in his home city that has taken books off shelves there, and cemented his decision to flee to a democratic island.
The transplanting of Mr. Lam’s life and work to Taiwan is a striking illustration of the changes under way in Hong Kong, a city that was itself until recently considered a place of refuge for people escaping authoritarian China. [FULL STORY]
