Lam is one of five Hong Kong booksellers detained by Chinese authorities in 2015, stirring concern that Beijing was curtailing freedom of expression in the former British colony that it took over in 1997.Chinese investigators had released Lam into Hong Kong, after eight months of detention in the mainland, to allow him to retrieve his computer and mobile phone, and then go back to China. But he never went back. And Hong Kong couldn’t force him to go, because it lacks an extradition law.
“It helps to placate people’s outrage,” Lam said when he heard about the extradition law being dropped. “But what Hong Kong people worry about most now is abuse of police power and no guarantee of personal safety.”Lam said his case began when undercover Chinese agents visited his bookshop, Causeway Bay Books. The career Hong Kong bookseller founded the store, located in a dense commercial district popular with tourists, in 1994 and sold it to the local publisher Mighty Current Media Co. in 2014.
A title that mentioned the private lives of Chinese leaders — forbidden on the mainland itself — earned about $3.83 million across all sales channels, Lam said. Lam said Chinese police ultimately let him back into Hong Kong to get his computer, figuring it would contain files useful for their investigation. He checked into a Hong Kong hotel, as agreed with Chinese authorities, but shortly after that, in June 2016, Lam told a news conference he would not return to the mainland.
“Mainland China wants unification, that’s clear,” Lam said. “They’ll try to get Taiwan after Hong Kong.”
The only has eyes for Hong Kong protests. Meanwhile it blacks out news about the months-long uprising in France against Macron’s impoverishing Neoliberal policies. GiletsJaunes MacronResign